It is not only the money.

It is the way a hospital bill sits on the kitchen table and poisons the whole room, the way a phone ringing at an unknown number floods your body with dread, the way you learn to calculate every small purchase against a background of catastrophe.

For five years I had lived inside that, and my mother had lived inside it longer, and we had both stopped remembering what it felt like to breathe without it.

Paying those bills off, one after another, was not like buying something.