"I was scared for him," Kristen said.
"I know."
"She was drunk at a seven-year-old's birthday party with a bounce house."
"I know. I'm not saying you were wrong. I'm telling you what she said to me on her couch with vomit on her shirt." He lowered his voice. "I'm telling you why she called me instead of you."
"And you agreed."
"I agreed to help her get into treatment. I agreed not to tell you until she was out and stable and could tell you herself. She wanted to be the one to tell you. She wanted to tell you with thirty days and a coin in her hand, so you'd see she'd done it. That was the deal."
"That was the deal," Kristen repeated. "And the money?"
He didn't answer.
"Brock. Cedar Hollow isn't a church basement with folding chairs. Her insurance is a joke, she works at a dentist's front desk. Who paid for it?"
"Her insurance covered the detox. Five days. After that they denied it. They said outpatient was appropriate." He laughed, a terrible small sound. "Outpatient. She'd have been using again inside a week. I know, because I was. The residential program was nine hundred dollars a day after the insurance quit."
She did the math before she wanted to. Twenty-three days. Eighteen days, after detox. She thought about the joint savings account, the one they called the porch fund as a joke because the house they wanted had a wraparound porch, the account she never looked at because he handled savings and she handled bills, because she trusted him, because that was what the word marriage meant to her.
"How much."
"Sixteen thousand two hundred," he said. "So far."
"So far."