The next morning I sat at my kitchen table with my checkbook, my bank statements, and the particular quality of attention you bring to something you’ve been avoiding. I added everything up. The monthly rent, thirty-six months. The groceries, which I estimated conservatively. The furniture. The various cash gifts and “emergency” transfers. The eight hundred euros. The total, when I wrote it at the bottom of the page, was a number I had never allowed myself to see in full, because I had understood, without articulating it, that seeing it would require me to decide what it meant.
It was my husband’s inheritance. Not mine to give twice.
I drove to First Community Bank and asked for Mr. Klein, who had managed my accounts since Klaus and I opened them together. He is a careful, methodical man who does not express alarm openly but communicates it through a certain quality of stillness. When I told him what I needed, he went very still.
I wanted every automatic transfer cancelled. I wanted my accounts restructured so that no transfer above a certain threshold could be initiated without my appearing in person. I wanted everything documented with timestamps. He asked me, in the gentle, careful way of someone who wants to give you an opportunity to reconsider, whether I was sure. I heard myself say yes without a tremor, which told me that some part of me had been sure for longer than I’d admitted.
My phone buzzed in my purse while Mr. Klein was processing the paperwork. Max. Then Lena. Then Max again. Three calls in the time it took to change a few account settings, as if they could feel the moment the faucet began to close.
