My lungs felt tight from the damp air coming up through the floorboards, so I reached into my drawer for my forty-two-dollar prescription inhaler and took two small puffs.

I opened my dresser drawer and lifted the drawer liner where I kept my handwritten yellow legal pad.

On the first page, written in big round numbers, was the total: eighty-five thousand dollars.

It was every penny from the sale of my small house down in Lancaster after my husband passed.

Mark had taken that draft from my bank seven months ago, telling me it would go straight into the property title as my personal share of his new house.

I looked at the dates I had recorded down the left side of the blue lines.