My 8-year-old son gave up his lunch money to buy a little girl with Down syndrome a red dress—the next morning, our lawn was covered with lunchboxes, but what was inside the biggest one made him go pale.

He thought somebody had robbed a bank and hidden it on our grass.

That is a completely reasonable conclusion and I have never once made fun of him for it.

I picked up the note.

And I did not go pale because of the money.

I went pale because I recognised the handwriting.

I was wrong on Thursday and I said it in front of people, which was worse.

This is for the little girl’s programme. All of it. Ask Perrin to take it and don’t tell her where it came from.

Don’t put my name on anything.

B.

Eighteen thousand four hundred dollars.

We counted it twice on my kitchen table with the blinds shut, and I rang my husband at work and made him come home, and the second count took forty minutes because neither of us could concentrate.

Bernice Vandrey has never had money.

She grew up in a house where the electric went off. She has worked since she was fifteen. She was a school cleaner for nineteen years and then she did nights in a laundry until she was sixty-two.