ROSE’S POV
I sat at my kitchen table on Sunday morning and I did the accounting that mattered most.
Not the accounting I had done three weeks ago, when I had opened the private account and moved money into it in small increments, telling myself it was simply precaution. This was different. This was the accounting of what had been promised against what had been delivered, and I had learned the difference between those two things well enough by now that I could not convince myself otherwise.
The cancelled evenings stacked up on the left side of the mental ledger. Eight in the past month alone. Not rescheduled. Not promised another time. Simply cancelled, with the specific rhythm of someone whose investment in maintaining something had declined past the point of performance.
The half-fi
