I had not asked. That is the thing I want down: I had come to ask about the money and the timeline and I had not thought about it once.

“He told me you were dying,” Emma said.

I sat there.

“In the September. He came over and he was — I’d never seen him like that, and I want to say clearly that I don’t think it was acting, or not all of it.

He said you’d been diagnosed and it was terminal and it was fast, and that he was destroyed, and that he could not leave you, and that we had to be very careful and very quiet and that he needed me to be patient.”

“And you believed it.”