Nothing else happened for five weeks and I want to describe those five weeks accurately, because “the calls stopped” makes it sound as though I was fine and I was not.

Silence from a collection agency does not feel like safety.

It feels like a thing being assembled somewhere else.

I checked my credit report twice a week.

I did not sleep properly in March.

I ran the numbers on the six thousand two hundred and forty dollars about once a day, and then on the forty-one thousand as well, because a part of me did not believe the statute, because a part of me was certain that a woman who had done something as foolish as marry a dying man at a county office in eleven minutes was not going to be let off by a sentence in a code.

And I told nobody except Greta.