She repaid small amounts when she could.
Sometimes two hundred dollars.
Sometimes nothing for a month.
I stopped measuring our relationship by the balance.
What mattered more was that she no longer asked me to rescue her.
She worked.
She budgeted.
She brought Noah to see me.
She slowly learned that love and access were not the same thing as entitlement.
Grant and I barely spoke.
That suited me.
Their marriage became their problem to solve.
Not mine.
One evening, I found an old photograph of Henry tucked inside a book.
He was fifty-six in the picture, sitting on our porch in a faded work shirt.
I remembered something he once said when Melissa was in college.
We had been discussing whether to send her extra money after she overspent one semester.
