Chapter 2: Debt Architecture

The spreadsheet had been sitting in a folder called ADMIN on his laptop for three years, updated monthly with the consistency of a man who preferred to know things even when knowing them changed nothing. Marcus opened it at six forty-three in the morning, still in yesterday's clothes, with a cup of coffee that had gone from hot to warm without him noticing the transition.

He started at the top.

Checking: four thousand, two hundred and eighteen dollars. Savings: eleven thousand, six hundred and forty. A number that had been declining at a rate he could calculate precisely — had calculated precisely, many times, in the particular way he calculated things he couldn't stop — since the teaching salary replaced the S.H.I.E.L.D. consulting stipend three years ago. The stipend had not been generous by the standards of what the work had actually cost him. It had been generous by the standards of a man trying to maintain a house and a marriage and a daughter's college fund on the eastern edge of a desert city. The teaching salary was not generous by any standard that applied to Marcus's actual life.