The coat came out of the closet on the first cold morning in October and the twenty was in the left pocket, folded twice, from a winter he could not place. He was forty-five and substitute teaching in a district that paid biweekly. He stood in the hallway holding the bill up to the window like a man checking it for a watermark, and said no way out loud, to nobody.

He texted his sister a photograph of it. He texted his ex-wife too, because it was funny, and she sent back the laughing face. It carried him through until roughly noon. Later that week he worked out that it had been the best thing to happen to him since August, and that the money had been his the whole time.