When he knows who you are, we do it properly and formally and through people, and it will be an amount a court would recognize, and it will not be an amount that makes either of us feel a particular way.

I am not taking a check across a table from you.

Nine.

If at any point you go quiet — if you don’t answer for two weeks, if you get overwhelmed, if it gets too hard — you tell me you’re struggling and we pause it deliberately.

You do not disappear.

I want to say this once, plainly: you have a documented history of solving a difficult feeling by changing your address.

That is not a cruel thing to say to you.