The morning after I got home, I sat at my own kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a notepad, and I did exactly what Marcus had taught me to do. I calculated. For eight years I had quietly carried pieces of their life that Marcus had apparently forgotten. The car. Two years earlier, when his old sedan died and they couldn’t get financing, I had co-signed the loan on the reliable SUV he now drove to work every day, and I had been quietly covering a portion of that payment ever since. The credit card in my name that Sabrina used for the baby’s medical bills. The eleven thousand dollars I had loaned them for their down payment, on nothing but a handshake and a promise. Marcus wanted everything itemized. So I itemized.

Then I made three calls, all of them entirely legitimate, all of them things a person is fully within her rights to do. I called the bank about the car loan. I called the credit card company. And I called my own attorney about the informal loan agreement Marcus had once laughingly signed as a “formality.” I was not being cruel. I was simply doing what he had insisted was the proper way for family to handle money. Everyone pays their share. By early afternoon, the arrangements were in motion, and by that evening my phone was ringing. It was Sabrina, and she was crying. But it was the second call, an hour later, that brought Marcus to my door the next morning on his knees.