My tracking came out to approximately eight hundred and fifty dollars a month across the period. Over six months, that’s fifty-one hundred dollars. Owen contributed four hundred total — two hundred in February and two hundred in April, both times when I mentioned the costs directly. Brooke sent three hundred dollars a month, reliably, every month, a hundred dollars more than I’d ever asked for and exactly the kind of consistency that told me she was taking it seriously even from two hours away.
The gap I covered myself was about twenty-nine hundred dollars, and that’s before accounting for the utility spike, the professional time I lost to evening work sessions, or the personal life I didn’t have for six months.
I didn’t think of this as a debt Owen owed me, exactly. I thought of it as information he needed to have.
## Priya Asks the Right Question
It was Priya, in late March, who asked me the question I should have been asking myself: “Have you actually talked to Brooke directly about what’s happening on Owen’s end?”
I had been talking to Brooke. We texted about the kids regularly. She called Max and Ella every Sunday, and they knew to expect her call, and on the weeks when she could make it for a Thursday evening dinner she would drive up and I’d have food ready and she’d spend two hours with them before driving back. She was present in their lives in the ways her circumstances allowed.
But Priya’s question was more specific. “Does she know that Owen keeps extending it? Does she know what he’s told you versus what he’s told her?”