When I handed him those three bank checks in May, he sat at his kitchen counter with an espresso cup and told me I would never have to worry about a roof over my head again.

Now I knew what document was sitting under the debt notices in his office drawer.

He had spent seven months taking three four-hundred-dollar envelopes out of my hands every four weeks while his lawyer typed out sentences about my failing mind.

He had wanted the eighty-five thousand dollars for Sloan’s old loans and his new sports coupe, and he wanted me behind a locked fence in Scioto County before the lake froze over.

If I had no money and no deed with my name on it, no court would take my word over a corporate marketing manager with a high-end house in Upper Arlington.