It related to an emergency admission on the eighth of November and a four-day inpatient stay, at a hospital in Minneapolis, arising from an episode with his liver that I did not know had happened.

The eighth of November is four weeks before a piece of cardboard.

I sat down on my stairs, which is a thing I apparently do, and read it four times.

And then I did what I think most people do, which is that for about ninety minutes I assumed I owed forty-one thousand three hundred and eighty dollars.

I had thirty-one thousand dollars in savings.

I had it because I am an accountant and because I had been putting away money since I was twenty-four for a deposit on a place of my own.