She knew it wasn’t the sixty-three thousand I’d lost.

But it was everything she’d been able to claw back with her own two hands.

I sat with that page a long time.

I kept picturing her doing it — my mother, in her nightgown, easing a bill out of Delroy’s wallet in the dark while he slept, her heart going hard in her chest, then folding it small and carrying it to the pantry and pressing it down into a tin behind the flour.

Not once.