I did not want her to have to understand that.

No child should have to do that arithmetic — to sit in a twelve-year-old car and weigh her own tuition against her aunt’s emergency and conclude, quietly, that the savings were not a thing to be spent on either panic.

But she had done it, and she had landed in the right place, and all I could do was make sure that her trust was not misplaced: that when she said okay and chose to believe her mother would hold the line, the line in fact held.

Four hundred and twenty dollars, due Friday, sitting in a child’s school folder beside a hundred and fifty thousand dollars that might or might not still be mine by the weekend.