I had to think about how to say it.

“Your mother told me for five months that I was making up cancer,” I said. “And you know what the worst part was? It wasn’t that she said it. It was that there was no piece of paper anywhere on earth that said I wasn’t. There was nothing to point at. It was just her word in a house, and my word in a house, and hers was louder.

“I have paper now. I have scans and pathology and a deposition transcript. It’s the only reason I’m all right. And I’m not going to live in a house that we got by making sure Paige never gets any.”

He signed it on a Tuesday.

I’m not going to tell you she deserved eleven thousand dollars, because she didn’t.

I’m going to tell you that I have been the person in the room whose version doesn’t get written down, and I decided I wasn’t going to make anyone else be that person, including her, including someone who called me a burden while I was starving.