Megan’s hundred and eighty thousand covered April, May, June, and most of July.

It paid for Zaya Boone’s imaging, and for the ablation the hospital’s charity program didn’t fully cover, and for a sliding-scale fund that Denise administers and I am not allowed to touch, because I have demonstrated that I will empty it on a Tuesday.

We made it. We’re not comfortable. We’re never going to be comfortable; that’s the model. But we made it, and we’re at eleven employees now, and the numbers are better than they were.

Megan and I are not sisters. I want to be accurate about that, because I know what the sentimental version would be.

We email maybe four times a year. She sent a photograph in November — our grandmother, who I never met, standing in front of a car in about 1961. No note. I wrote back three sentences.

That’s the pace, and I don’t think it’s going to change, and I’ve stopped expecting it to.