Marcus’s silence on the phone told me everything. He had helped. He had carried my desk, my sofa, my grandmother’s box down the stairs while I lay in a hospital bed, and now, three years later, he was calling at five in the morning to ask me to undo the very thing he had helped build. I did not scream at him. I had done my screaming quietly, into folders and printouts and an attorney’s patient hands. Instead I told him the truth. The paperwork reaching their door was not something I could stop, because it had already outgrown me. It was with the district attorney now, and the civil court, and the insurance investigators who had questions about a memorial collection raised for a woman who was demonstrably alive.

“You told people I died,” I said. “That has a name, Marcus. Several names.” He begged. He said Mom was sick, that Dad couldn’t handle it. I asked him where that concern had been when I was sleeping under Priya’s blanket with stitches in my side. That was when I explained exactly what those three quiet years had actually been.