Chapter 13: You Reached

I folded the check in half and put it inside the copy of page nine.

"I won't cash it," I said.

Blaine's mother stared at me across the table.

"Then why take it?"

"Because you wrote my name on something true."

Her mouth worked, and nothing came out of it.

"He'll find out there's nothing behind the house," she said.

"Does he know you're here?"

"No."

"Then he won't hear it from me tonight."

She stood, buttoned her grey coat to the throat and looked toward the booth by the door.

Carly looked back at her over a fork of pie.

"What will you do?" Blaine's mother asked.

"Add," I said.

She left a ten under her cup, and the bell over the door rang behind her.

At seven on Sunday morning I sat in my sister's kitchen with a laptop and a cold coffee.

I had not slept at all.

The spreadsheet was open to the tab I'd named "Household" four years ago, when I still thought of it as a favor I was keeping track of.

Carly sat across from me in her flannel with the copy of the prenup and read page nine out loud, slowly.

"Any money, labor or services," she said. "That's you. That's every Tuesday you drove Birdie to the dentist."

"Don't."

"I'm going to be angry in your kitchen, then, since you won't."

"It's your kitchen."

"Then I'm entitled."

I went down the columns one at a time.

Two mortgage months, when his payment had come late and mine had gone through.

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