I had spent my whole adult life making sure those two numbers never had to be in the same sentence.

Now they were in the same car.

I kept glancing at the folder on Zoe’s lap at the stop lights.

Four hundred and twenty dollars, due Friday, a bill I could normally pay without a second thought — and it had become, that week, a small hard test of the very principle I was trying to hold: that my savings were not a pool everyone in trouble could reach into, not even for a sister stranded overseas, not even for the warm relief of being the one who fixed it.

If I could not protect a hundred and fifty thousand dollars from a man in Dubai, I had no business calling it protected at all.