“Samantha,” she said. “You are the only person in this arrangement who is opening the mail.”

In June, after Meridian, I did something I had not done in five years, which was read the judgment properly. All of it. Ninety-one pages, at my kitchen table, over three nights.

I found something on page sixty-four that I had been told at the time and had not absorbed.

The restitution order was joint and several among three defendants. Paige had paid eleven thousand dollars of it in a lump sum in year two, from the sale of a car, before she went in.

Brenda’s obligation had been reduced to nine thousand at sentencing because of her assets and age, and she had satisfied it in full in 2021.

Brenda Miller is done. She has been done for years. She paid nine thousand dollars and she is legally square with me forever.