I put the second one in the same drawer, and the third, and by the fourth I understood that I had begun a practice, and by year two the drawer had a rubber band in it and I had stopped opening them and started only looking at the postmark and putting them in.

There were fifty-eight envelopes in that drawer by the spring the Meridian contract died.

I did not cash a single one. Not because of principle. Because cashing it required me to sign my name on the back of a check that had his register number printed on the face, and I found — the first time, standing at my own kitchen counter with a pen — that I could not do it and could not explain why.

I told my therapist about the drawer in the fourth year. Her name is Dr. Aurelia Sandoval and I have seen her since three months after the trial.

She asked me what the drawer was for.

I said it was evidence, and she waited, in the way she does, and after about ninety seconds I said: “It’s proof he still has to.”