"And you chose cancel."
"I chose to stop the automatic payment for the private suite while I figured out what to do. I thought — God, Daniel, I thought — they would call me. I thought there would be a notice period. I thought I was buying us two weeks to have a conversation as a family. I signed a form they emailed. It said temporary suspension of private suite billing pending account review. I did not read it carefully enough. I did not understand that their system treats suspension of a private suite as vacancy of that room. Someone in their office processed it as a full cancellation. By the time I got the confirmation email this afternoon, your mother was already packing."
Daniel sat down hard on the armchair across from her. The house creaked softly, settling into its night bones. Upstairs, Margaret was presumably lying on guest-room sheets staring at a ceiling that had never expected her.
"You signed something that put my mother on the street."
"I signed something that was supposed to pause a billing arrangement I could no longer afford alone," Allison said. "The facility mishandled it. I mishandled the reading of it. Both things can be true. I am not a villain in a story, Daniel. I am a wife who has been quietly panicking about money for a year while you believed everything was fine because the lights stayed on and the kids got their soccer cleats."
"You should have told me."