“Four hundred and something.”
My pulse shifted.
“Four hundred thousand?”
“Possibly.”
“Noah.”
“I was exhausted.”
I waited.
He stared at the flashlight as though it might rescue him.
“Four hundred twelve thousand five hundred.”
The room seemed to lose sound.
I looked at him, but his expression did not mirror my shock. He appeared detached from the figure, as if it belonged to an account held by strangers.
“That is…” I began.
“A number.”
“A very large number.”
“It doesn’t feel real.”
I could think of bills. Repairs. Debt. Months of lost work. The future we had stopped daring to imagine.
But Noah’s face warned me not to turn his suffering into arithmetic.
“We’ll deal with it at the meeting,” I said.
“Good.”
“And when we’re done, we’ll go to the clinic.”
His shoulders eased.
“Good.”
I raised his hand and pressed my mouth to his knuckles.
“This belongs to you.”
“The testing?”
“Every decision we make from here.”
His gaze drifted toward the bottle in the open drawer.
“When we eventually…” He stopped.
I waited without supplying the word.
“When we have sex,” he tried again, quieter, “I want it to feel close.”
