I’ve spent three weeks working out whether to write to you. I want to be clear that I am not asking for the money back. I’m asking because I’ve thought you were dead since about the following March, and if you’re not, I’d like to know, and if you are then someone else is reading this and I’m sorry.

Dolores Amaya

I read it eleven times in a conference room in San Francisco with a quarterly review going on behind me on a screen.

Then I went into the stairwell and sat on the concrete steps between floors nine and ten for about twenty minutes.

Here is what I knew about the terminal illness lie, before that email.

I knew it existed. Susan told me in her office in the third week — that Everett had filed for indefinite unpaid leave claiming I’d been diagnosed and needed treatment in Boston.