Every night I built a little less of his defense.

And by the end of the two weeks the reflex was quiet at last, and I could see the thing plainly, and it was as bad as it looked.

So that when he walked into the kitchen that morning and demanded another twenty-eight thousand on top of it — for his mother’s holiday, as though the first forty had never happened — I gave him an answer he had not heard from me in seven years of marriage.

Chapter 4 — No