Thirty-five hundred a month.

Forty-two thousand a year.

I worked it out on the back of the hotel notepad and got the same number twice, and I still couldn’t have named one single thing that money had really paid for.

So I opened the bank app.

The transfers ran down the screen in a tidy column, one each month, going back farther than I could scroll.

Same amount, same day, same two-word description.