I went home. I made spaghetti. I sat on the end of my bed for a while with the door shut.

And then a thing happened that decided it, and it had nothing to do with the money.

Nolan had been odd for months, and I’d been telling myself it was ten. Quiet at the wrong times. Turning the lights off in rooms nobody was in.

He’d asked me twice whether we still had the apartment lease “just in case,” a question with no possible answer.

In April I found a returned permission slip for a field trip in the recycling, unsigned, the twenty-two-dollar box blank. He hadn’t told me it existed.

That night, past eleven, I found him at the kitchen table with a legal pad, and on it, in his handwriting, was a budget.