Month 3. The eviction notice arrived on a Tuesday, certified mail requiring Michel's signature like the universe demanded he acknowledge his failure formally. Thirty days to vacate. The paper trembled in his hands—thin, official, final.
He'd hidden it in his desk drawer under old warranties, but houses hold no secrets from children who've learned to listen for danger. That evening, Michel found David teaching Sophie to count coins on the living room carpet. His son's piggy bank—ceramic, shaped like a soccer ball—sat cracked open beside Sophie's pink unicorn bank. The break looked deliberate, careful, like David had used his father's hammer from the garage.
"We want to help," David said, his small voice steady with purpose. Quarters sorted into towers, dimes in rows, nickels and pennies segregated by year like he'd seen his father organize invoices. "$47.83. We counted twice."
Sophie held up a ziplock bag of quarters. "I been saving for a bicycle, but houses are more 'portant." She said it matter-of-fact, like she was choosing between cereals. The purple bike in the store window, the one she'd shown him every Saturday for six months, dismissed in seven words.
The walls Michel had built around his heart crumbled. These weren't just coins—they were tooth fairy payments, birthday dollars from Abuela, reward money for straight A's. David's soccer camp fund. Sophie's bike dream. Their childhood converted to currency.
Maria rushed in from the kitchen, took one look at the scene, and pulled all four of them into a fierce embrace. They stayed there on the carpet, a family reduced to its essence—just love and determination in the face of an indifferent world. Sophie's quarters pressed between them, David's careful accounting abandoned as they held each other like survivors of a shipwreck.
That night, after the children slept, Michel sat with their offering on the table. $47.83. Their entire worlds in coins and wrinkled bills. He thought of his own father, laid off from the factory when Michel was David's age. Remembered slipping his paper route money into his father's work boots, the same secret charity, the same small hands trying to hold up a breaking sky.
The cycle, repeating.
"No," he whispered to the darkness. "Not like this."