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Her mouth flattens.

“You’ve argued method with me twice in three weeks,” she says. “Nine years, and now twice in three weeks.”

“You’re the one who taught me that method is the only thing that ever costs you money.”

“So I did.” One corner of her mouth lifts. “Go on. Drive him home. He’s waiting for you at the end of my corridor like a man waiting outside a headmaster’s office, which is making my receptionist nervous.”

I do the arithmetic on Friday night, and it doesn’t improve on Saturday.

The retirement account is two hundred thirty-one thousand and change. It’s been there since I was twenty-nine, funded monthly, untouched. A man in my profession with no wife, no children, and no property has exactly one way to prove to himself that the last twenty years happened.

I call the provider Saturday morning. A young man with a headset takes me through the penalty, then the withholding, twice. He doesn’t believe I understood the first time. Finally he says, very gently, “Sir, you’d be leaving about a third of it on the table.” I tell him to file it anyway.

One hundred and fifty-two thousand net, eleven business days.

Savings: twenty-two, which is sixty-two minus the forty I put into Kieran’s accounts in February and can’t take back out without it showing.

The operating account of Brandt Financial: nine and a half.

The car, which a dealer off the beltway will take on Monday for seven if I don’t argue about it.

One hundred and ninety thousand, five hundred dollars.

Three hundred thousand is what she wants. That’s what the goal is worth in her book, given what she can put on a first-period total eleven days ahead of a market. I’m a hundred ten short with nothing left to sell.

I sit at my own kitchen table on a Saturday night in the port district with four printouts squared up in front of me. I go through it again to see whether the number improves if I look at it differently.

Numbers don’t change. That’s what I’ve always liked about them.

I go out at eleven on Saturday night and walk down to the water. I stand at the end of the quay in the cold with the sodium lights on the containers and the black chop slapping the pilings. There’s a ship at the far berth being worked under floodlights by men in orange. I’m thirty-eight years old. Everything I have is a hundred and ten thousand dollars short of one shot in the first period of a hockey game in March.

On Sunday, I try the two remaining doors.

The first is a man in the north of the city. He’s lent to me twice for clients and takes my Sunday call because I’ve never been late paying him back. He listens for ninety seconds, then asks what the security is. I tell him there isn’t any.

He laughs, not unkindly. “Marek, you’ve been doing this longer than me. You know what I’m going to say.”

“I do.”

“Then why’d you call?”

I don’t have an answer for that. We talk about his daughter’s wedding for four minutes, then hang up.

The second is the apartment. I’ve rented for nineteen years because property gives a man an address that can be photographed, an asset that can be attached. Every one of those decisions was correct when I made it. Now each one is a door with nothing behind it.

I own a car, a laptop, and a watch I stopped wearing.

The dealer off the beltway walks around the car twice Sunday afternoon, offers me six. I say seven. He says seven with the winter tires. Fine. That’s the entire negotiation for the last thing I have. He takes it Tuesday evening; the money clears Thursday.

Monday morning. Kieran’s kitchen. Seven o’clock, which is my window on a schedule I made in December.

He’s at the counter cutting an orange with a paring knife, left to right in even slices, like a man dividing rations.

“Don’t do it,” I say.

He doesn’t stop cutting.

“I’m handling it,” I say. “There’s another way to the same place, and I’m most of the way through it. Give me until the end of the week.”