Our emergency checking account held exactly two thousand one hundred and eighty dollars, while the hospital wanted four thousand seven hundred and sixty dollars for my surgical stay.

Our credit cards were perilously close to their limits, and my next disability check from work wouldn’t come for another three miserable weeks.

Peter had lost his regular overtime shifts at the manufacturing plant back in the spring, which cut his take-home pay by almost thirty percent just as our medical costs exploded.

I knew we were in serious financial trouble, but seeing the raw, unvarnished math laid out across my yellow notepad filled me with a cold, frightening dread.

For the first time since this nightmare started, I could understand the crushing panic that had backed Peter into a corner.