I did the math right there at the table while she hummed at the stove. Twenty-eight thousand dollars and some change. Gone. Her savings used to sit around sixty-seven thousand, I knew that number cold because I’d helped her with taxes.

Now it was sitting at thirty-one. I asked her, real gentle, what that monthly payment was for. She waved her hand at me like it was nothing. “Oh, that’s my medical, honey,” she said. “Kevin handles all that for me.” Kevin handles all that for me. I had to look down at the table.

I should’ve stopped right there. I had more than enough to make me sick. But I’m stubborn, always have been, and I kept turning pages. That little bitty print Mom can never read. And way in the back, I found something that had been added on. They call it a rider. Tacked on just three months ago.

Accidental death benefit. I read it twice because the words wouldn’t sit still. If I were to die in an accident, the payout tripled. Five hundred thousand became one and a half million dollars. One point five million. For an accident.

And the date on that rider. Lord, I keep coming back to the date.

Three months ago. I sat there trying to think what on earth was special about three months ago, and then it landed on me, and I’d give anything to un-know it. Three months ago is when Kevin called me up all chipper and asked me to go hiking with him. Just the two of us, he said. Brother and sister, like when we were young. He’d already picked the spot and everything. Pinnacle Ridge. A cliffside trail. He talked it up so sweet I said yes before I even thought about it.

The trip is this Saturday. This coming Saturday. I already bought the boots, they’re sitting by my back door.

I sat in Mom’s kitchen and I went cold all the way through. I want so badly to be wrong about this. I keep telling myself I’m a paranoid old fool reading way too much into a stack of paper. People buy insurance. People go hiking. It happens. But that rider date and that phone call fall in the same week. The same exact week. And no matter how many times I turn it over, I can’t make that line up as nothing.

Here’s the part that really chews on me, though. Kevin’s been struggling. I knew that much. His business folded two years back and he and Sandra are behind on the house. He’d never say it out loud, but I’m his sister, I see it. The flowers got cheaper. His truck’s been making a noise he won’t pay to fix. I used to feel sorry for him. I’d slip him a couple hundred when Mom wasn’t looking and tell him not to mention it. I was the one helping him, go figure.