Samuel said it was structurally absurd and that he’d sign it.

Hannah cried in my office, which she had not done in six years, and then she said, “Can we get a drink after work like people,” and we did, and it was awful for about forty minutes and then it wasn’t.

She is my friend again. It took a year and a governance structure, which is the least romantic sentence in this account, and it is the true one.

Chapter 15 — What Clara Said

Clara Ovalle came back in September.

I had not heard from her in four years. Not since the afternoon she sat in my office in a thick sweater in the summer heat with her husband outside checking his watch, and I gave her a secure phone and a shelter contact and told her I believed her.

I had built that afternoon into something. I want to be honest about that before I write down what she told me. I had described it — at two conferences, in a magazine interview, and once, God help me, in the firm’s marketing copy — as the day I understood what the work was for.