It was not a refusal.

That is what took me nineteen years to see.

She could not pay it.

Not out of her own pocket, because there was nothing in her own pocket, and not out of the trust, because a four-hundred-and-eighty-dollar medical distribution to the beneficiary would have appeared on an accounting next to a four-thousand-eight-hundred-dollar fee, and a single line like that is the entire case.

Part Sixteen: The Fire