THE NIGHT WE PA.ID OFF OUR HOUSE, MY MOTHER-IN-LAW TOASTED: “NOW I CAN MAKE THIS HOUSE MY O.WN.” MY HUSBAND SMILED. BY MORNING, SHE WAS BEGGING HIM TO STOP ME.

Witness: Karen Mercer Doyle.

That’s why Karen couldn’t look at me over the dishes.

I sat on the floor until the window started to go gray.

Here’s what I want you to understand about that moment. Because people always ask me why I didn’t just march upstairs and wake Greg up and scream.

I’d been a pharmacist for fifteen years. When a prescription is wrong, you don’t scream at the patient. You don’t scream at the doctor. You don’t fill it and hope it works out.

You stop. You figure out exactly what’s wrong. And you fix the part you can fix before anybody swallows anything.

So I didn’t wake Greg.

I sat on the floor and thought about what was actually wrong.

It wasn’t the money. Not really. Diane had helped us. That part was true. Nineteen times. When we were drowning. I’d never have known how close we came.