I want to be precise about that, because the easy version of this story ends with a slammed door and a clean break, and that is not the version I chose.

I was setting the note down inside a boundary, where it could stay, unanswered, for as long as it needed to, a door left closed but not locked, which is a harder thing to hold than either a hug or a wall.

A hug would have meant pretending the last three years had not happened, picking the money back up, calling the whole thing a misunderstanding so that Sunday dinners could resume.

A wall would have meant blocking the number, returning the note unopened, declaring in the group that I was done with all of them forever, which has its own satisfactions and its own costs and is, in its way, as much a performance as the hug.