Forty-one thousand two hundred dollars.

I did the thing I always do with a figure that frightens me, which is to say it over until it stops being a sum and becomes only a sound, but it would not stop being a sum.

It was my mother’s lake, and it was the margin between my son and the particular fear I had grown up inside, and it was, I was beginning to understand, the thing my husband had decided he needed more than he needed the two people he had promised, thirty years before, to keep.

Chapter 6 — Those Dates Cannot Both Be the Beginning