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The room is very quiet. A blood pressure cuff hisses somewhere down the hall. A phone rings at a desk. Nobody answers it.

Fin doesn’t say anything.

That’s how I know. Not the black fingers, not the nine calls, not the counter he wiped for no reason. Fin sits on the paper-covered table with his ruined hand in his lap and says nothing.

“We’ll splint it tonight,” the doctor says. “The hand surgeon will take a look on Thursday. He’s going to want to pin at least two of these.”

“Fine,” I say. “Whatever he wants.”

“There’ll be a cost conversation with the front desk.”

“Fine,” I say again.

We don’t talk in the truck until the highway. Then Fin talks the whole way. None of it is about the hand. A job in the north end fell through. A guy called Petey owes him for a deck. The price of lumber is a crime, an actual crime; somebody should be in prison for what lumber costs.

I take the exit for his place, pull into the drive, and leave the engine running.

He stops talking.

The heater ticks. The DOYLE CONTRACTING truck sits in front of us with its dead gate latch that I now know he never meant to fix, because it was never broken.

“How much?” I say.

“Kieran…”

“How much?”

He puts his left hand flat on his knee and looks at it. My brother is thirty-one years old. He has the same black hair I do, though he keeps his long. He has our mother’s eyes, and so do I. Everything that happens inside him happens on his face, where anyone can watch it. It’s always been that way. When we were kids, I could tell what he was thinking from the driveway.

“It was ninety when it started,” he says. “Two years ago. Ninety, that’s nothing; that’s a bad quarter. I’ve had bad quarters.”

“How much now?”

“It doesn’t work like a bank. It compounds different. I did the math about eight times. The number never comes out the same twice.” He’s talking faster. “Then there are fees on top. They don’t call them fees. They call it a service arrangement. I told the guy that’s a fee, and he said⁠—”

“Fin. How much?”

“One point four.”

The number sits there.

“Million,” he says, in case I didn’t understand.

I don’t say anything for a while. My hands are on the wheel at ten and two, which is where they’ve been since I parked. I take them off, put them on my knees, and then take my wallet out of my back pocket.

There’s a parking stub in my wallet from the visitors’ lot at Saint Brigid’s, printed thirteen minutes past eleven, with a barcode along the bottom. I take the pen out of the cupholder, the one the equipment manager gave me for autographs.

I write 1,400,000 on the blank side of the stub.

Fin watches me do it. “What’s that for?”

I fold the stub, then tuck it back in my wallet. “You’re going to have surgery next month. You’re going to heal. You’re not spending four years paying interest on the years you should have been working. Go inside.”

He starts to argue, but I cut him off. “Don’t be like that. Take the pills and go to bed.”

He gets out. Then he leans back in through the open door with his splint held against his chest. “You’re not going to tell anybody.”

“No.”