Account cleared.

Nineteen thousand transferred to checking.

Let’s get on this boat before the traffic starts.

I held the paper in both hands for a moment, feeling the stiff texture of the copy paper under my fingertips.

The pity I had felt five minutes earlier turned into a cold, hard stillness.

He hadn’t been dragged along by an overbearing mother, and he hadn’t been tricked by complicated legal language in a black document case.

He had worked out the price of leaving his four-year-old daughter behind in a quiet house, bought his ticket, and complained about the sound of her crying while he packed his bags.