My name is Mara. I’m thirty-seven years old.

I’m a nurse practitioner. I’ve been one for eleven years. I work long shifts on a cardiac unit in Providence. I own a small condo. I drive a four-year-old Subaru. I have a savings account that doesn’t make my chest tighten when I look at it.

None of that was always true.

The house was a blue cape on the Maine coast. I paid $425,000 for it, in cash, and put it in my parents’ names. It wasn’t about me. It was about a promise I made when I was fifteen, standing in the hallway of our apartment, listening to my mother go silent over a heating bill.

It took me twenty-two years to keep that promise.

It took my sister about four days to try to take it apart.

I grew up on the third floor of a six-story building in Providence. Three bedrooms. Thin walls. One bathroom with a shower that went cold after eight minutes. A kitchen where the linoleum curled up at the corners.

My mother patched those corners with duct tape. Then she painted the tape white so it would blend in.

It didn’t blend in. But she tried. That was my mother. She always tried.

My parents weren’t careless people. I need you to understand that. My father worked facilities maintenance at a hospital for twenty-three years. Steady, union, honest work. My mother worked part-time in medical records and picked up more hours as we got older.

They were careful. They paid things on time when they could. They clipped coupons. They never bought anything on credit they couldn’t pay off.

They just lived right at the edge. One bad month meant something had to wait. And sometimes waiting meant it never happened at all.

When I was nine, the hospital changed management and cut the maintenance contract.

I remember the night my father came home and told my mother. I was supposed to be asleep. I was lying on the floor of my bedroom with my ear near the gap under the door.

“They’re bringing in an outside company,” he said.

“Can you apply with them?”

“I did. They said they’d call.”

They didn’t call.

He found other work after four months. It paid less. The benefits were worse. And by then his back had started to go. He never complained about it. He just walked slower. He sat down differently, one hand on the arm of the chair, lowering himself in stages.

The pill bottles in the medicine cabinet multiplied. Two. Then four. Then six.

I knew what they cost, because on the fifteenth of every month I heard my mother whisper the number to him at the kitchen table.

That was the year she started cutting the pills in half.

I saw her do it once. She was standing at the counter with a butter knife, pressing it down on a small white tablet, very carefully, so it would split clean. She put one half back in the bottle and swallowed nothing. She was making the bottle last twice as long.

She saw me watching.

She didn’t explain. I didn’t ask.

I was ten. I already understood.