There is a kind of person who has spent so long converting everything into numbers that they lose the ability to see anything that a number cannot hold, and once a person has crossed fully into that country, no argument can reach them, because argument itself is just more words, and words are cheap, and everything for them has a price except the things that actually matter, which have vanished entirely from their sight.

I could have stood in that office for an hour describing his mother’s face when I walked in, her worry over whether I was sleeping, her tears at every parting, and Arthur would have heard only a delivery driver trying to justify a windfall.

He did not have the equipment to receive what I would have been telling him.

So I gave him the six words that would fit through the narrow opening that was left, the only words that might lodge somewhere and trouble him on a quiet night.

She knew the whole time.