I remembered the night I’d made the decision, and the memory had a bitter shine to it now.

He had been genuinely worried — or I had believed he was — sketching numbers on a napkin, talking about the people who depended on him, the researchers he’d have to let go if the expansion stalled.

I had sat across from him and felt something I hadn’t let myself feel in years: the simple pleasure of being able to fix a thing for someone I loved, without their ever knowing it was me.

That was the fantasy the money had always denied me — the quiet, invisible generosity of an ordinary partner.

I couldn’t buy him a house without exposing myself, couldn’t hand him a check without ending the test.

But I could reach into the machinery of the city from behind a curtain and make the ground firm under his particular feet, and he would go on believing he had done it alone, and I would go on loving him for the man who could.