Nora did not answer. She was thinking about the baby asleep upstairs in the crib Daniel had built himself from salvaged maple, in the little room with the slanted ceiling and the window that looked out at the lake. She was thinking about a sheriff's sale. She was thinking about the word vacate.
"How much do you have," she said.
"In what?"
"Anywhere. Checking. Savings. Retirement. What's the business account look like?"
He told her. It was bad. It was worse than bad.
"Okay," Nora said. She was surprised how calm her voice sounded. "Okay."
She went upstairs and got her laptop, and she came back down and opened it at the kitchen table, and she logged into her credit union account, and she turned the screen so that he could see the balance of the account she called the House.
He stared at it for a long time.
"No," he said finally.
"It isn't for you."
"Nora, no. That's your—that's everything you've got."
"It's not for you," she said again, steadily. "It's for her. It's for the room upstairs. It's for my sister's name. You're going to let me do this, and you're going to find work, real work, and you're going to fight those people from the Cities, and when you're back on your feet, you're going to pay me back. That's the deal."
He put his face in his hands.
"And I want it in writing," Nora said. "Not because I don't trust you. Because I've been a medical coder for nine years, and I've seen what happens to people when nobody writes anything down."
He did write it down, that night, on a sheet of yellow legal paper from Tessa's desk. It was not a beautiful document. It said that Nora Brandt was advancing funds to cure the default on the mortgage at 1418 East Tenth Avenue and to make the monthly payments until such time as Daniel Halvorsen was able to resume them, and that these funds were a loan, to be repaid in full. He signed it. She signed it. She photographed it with her phone and then she folded it into quarters and put it in the back of a spiral notebook, the kind with a green cardboard cover that she bought in packs of five for her work notes.
Then he said the thing she would remember. He said it looking at the table, not at her.
"Please don't tell anyone. Not my mom. Not Erik. Not anybody. I can't—please. Just let me fix it. Let me fix it, and then nobody ever has to know."
She thought that he meant he was ashamed. She thought that shame was a thing a decent person could be forgiven for. She said yes.
* * *