It was ninety-one transfers, between two hundred and eleven hundred dollars, spread across two years, in a pattern that Naomi described as “specifically designed to sit under the threshold where a spouse looks at a line.”

Nineteen of them were on the twenty-eighth of a month, which is the day my salary landed.

I sat on the floor of a hotel room and looked at a spreadsheet on a laptop for about forty minutes without moving.

Because it recontextualized everything, and I want to lay out exactly how.

In September 2023 I had cancelled a trip to see my father in Duluth because we could not afford the flights.

In the spring of 2024 I had told the daycare we would have to move Daisy from four days to three, and I had cried in the car afterward, and Mitchell had held me that night and said we’d get there.