Faced with losing everything I had, I discovered I could not afford to give it up.

I’d cut the pills, cold turkey. I’d focused my attentions on Eli, helping him with his trauma. I’d tried even harder to become the wife Ken wanted—June Cleaver in the kitchen, Jessica Rabbit in the bedroom. It had worked for a while, sort of. Mostly.

Then Ken took a new job and started traveling more often. His trips got longer. He started spending more time in the office he’d converted from my father’s basement workshop. He secured his phone and laptop with passwords I couldn’t guess. Our sex life fizzled. I started shopping. It was not a bad life. It was a nothing life, but I lived it for the sake of my son, who’d already undergone too much distress. I’ve done everything I can to make sure Eli feels safe, that Ken is happy.

And Ken dares to lecture me about being appropriate?

I close my burning eyes. I swallow bitterness. I wait until his breathing steadies, and then I creep out of bed and downstairs.

In the basement laundry room, I search the small pile of stuff Ken took from his pockets and left on top of the dryer. Spare change. A five dollar bill. A receipt for a fast-food burger joint with more than one meal on it, which tells me everything or means nothing at all. An empty, creased, and crumpled envelope, no sign of what it had once contained. I make sure to put everything back the way I found it.

Kneeling in front of the sink, I reach back, back, into the cabinet beneath it. My fingers fumble around the pipes. I feel paper, worn and creased, an envelope much like the one I found in Ken’s pocket trash. This one isn’t empty. I press it, feeling the small lumps of something hard, like beads.

It would be easy, so easy, to pull out this envelope and open it. To take out the contents and let them slip past my lips, down my throat, into my belly. Then, at least for a little while, nothing could bother me.

The envelope rattles. I hold my breath as I open the flap to look inside. There should be twenty pills in it. There are only twelve.

I bend, looking deep into the recesses of the cabinet. On the bottom of it, I see one pill. It’s perilously close to the hole for the pipe. I feel that open space, but my fingers come out with only rust and dirt. The other pills are gone, fallen into that hole from out of the envelope’s open flap, or, who knows, maybe they dissolved over time. I could’ve miscounted them the last time I checked them, except of course I know I didn’t, because I’ve known exactly how many pills were in that envelope since the day I put them there a decade ago.

Twelve is enough, though. More than. But I’m not going to take even a single one. I push them back into the envelope. I lick the glue on it, grimacing at the sour taste. I press it shut. It’s so old that it doesn’t stick, so I fold it over and over again, making sure to keep the opening upward as I tuck it away again.