There's a space between you and every person in your life, and something is always growing in it. Most of us fill it with whatever the other person threw in first: the sharp word, the silence, the thing they did that you still can't shake. But what if what they put in has no bearing on what you put in? An old story about an unpayable debt, a man begging for time, and the hands that pleaded and then choked asks a harder question than “how many times?”—and it won't let you off with a number.