Sitting in the back of that car with the app open, I understood, with no anger and complete precision, what my money had actually been doing all that time.

It had not been buying peace, or love, or even tolerance.

It had been buying a fiction — an elaborate, expensive fiction in which Craig was a successful man and Noreen was a beloved matriarch and I was a lucky woman to be allowed into such a family.

Every dollar had gone to maintain a story in which I was the debtor and they were the creditors, when the arithmetic had always run precisely the other way.

And the strangest part, the part I kept turning over, was how little it took to end it.

It was not a dramatic act.