Renata did not look away while she said it. “I said it because forty-one of us had been made fools of and I wanted somebody to be the fool with. And I’ve thought about that sentence for two years, and here you are, and I’d like to take it back.”

I told her she could not take it back and that she had said it in a break room in a bad month and that I had spent seven years married to him and had not known either.

She took the check. She said, “This doesn’t square it.” I said no, it doesn’t.

The total I paid out was nineteen thousand two hundred and forty dollars, including the people who never answered, whose money I sent by cashier’s check to their last known addresses through Gavin’s office with a one-page letter, and eleven of which came back undeliverable and sit in a client account to this day.

Gavin told me the restitution order already covers it and that I am, in a legal sense, paying a debt I do not owe with money I recovered from the person who does.

I know. I asked him to do it anyway.