A formal request asking whether you’d agree to reduce his monthly restitution payments by twenty percent.

He’s claiming ‘extreme financial hardship.'”

I took the envelope, and I waited to feel something.

I had wondered, over the months, what it would feel like when Roman came, at last, asking me for mercy — whether it would be satisfying, whether some old wounded part of me would savor it, whether I would feel the hot pleasure of a debt being repaid in humiliation.

And I felt none of that.