Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t at twenty-six, standing on a stage with a torn check in my hand.

Nobody in Room 314 ever asked my father what he could pay. They told him what it cost.

He was a man who could have paid it and chose not to, and he deserves everything he got and a great deal he never will.

But I walked out of that room believing that the question *how much* is what a monster sounds like.

And I carried that for eighteen years, into a career and a building and an exam room, until I nearly sent a nine-year-old home with a tumor because her father asked it in the wrong voice.

I used to say that love doesn’t calculate the cost, it simply pays it.