He spent those days in public libraries, in the quiet reading rooms, sending out applications from a corner table, and he came home again at five-thirty each evening with the posture and the tiredness of a man returning from work, and he performed the whole elaborate pantomime for his own family, day after day, so that not one of them would suspect that the floor had already given way.

And to keep the mortgage paid while he kept up the performance, he had been quietly drawing down their joint emergency savings — the account they had built together over years, dollar by dollar, against exactly this kind of catastrophe — hoping, desperately, morning after morning in those library reading rooms, that he would land a new position and refill the account and close the whole secret over before Martha ever had cause to look inside it.

And that was the machinery, Martha understood now, that had run over her daughter.

Because when Irene’s pain flared into something that required a specialist, Mark had not, in that moment, been a father weighing his child’s health.