Mitchell’s salary went, I was told, into the principal.

I never checked.

I want that written down plainly, because it is the single stupidest thing I have done in my adult life, and because I know exactly why I didn’t.

I was working sixty hours a week at a logistics company, and I had a toddler, and checking would have meant a conversation, and I did not have one more conversation in me.

And meanwhile the temperature of that apartment dropped about one degree a month for four years.

It was never anything I could hold up.