On October twenty-sixth, five hundred dollars in cash.

Every week had a cash withdrawal of somewhere between four hundred and eight hundred dollars, all taken at local bank counters or neighborhood machines.

I hadn’t made a single one of them.

My three-thousand-dollar monthly transfers weren’t sitting in the joint account paying down the principal on the home loan.

They were being pulled out as paper bills every seven days.

I turned the key and drove back to the house in the dark, the wet tires humming over the damp asphalt.