Chapter 142

#9

Eli’s POV

The numbers won’t change no matter how many times he looks at them.

This is a thing Eli has known since he was old enough to understand what numbers meant, that staring at them longer doesn’t produce different results, that the math is the math and wishing it were otherwise is a luxury that costs more than he has. He knows this. He still opens the banking app and closes it and opens it again, because the alternative is sitting at the kitchen table at seven in the morning with nothing to do but listen to the apartment breathe.

He lays it out the way he does every two weeks, Notepad, pen, phone face-up for the calculator. Rent on the left column. Utilities. Groceries, estimated. His mother’s kidney medication, which is not estimated because it doesn’t vary and cannot be reduced and is, by itself, more th