“It’s not, particularly,” she said. “But it’s what he’s got. I’m sorry you drove.”

I drove home the same day, four hours, and I did not feel wronged and I did not feel absolved, and I have come to understand that this is what most of it is going to be from now on.

The check is in Gavin’s client account with the eleven undeliverable ones. I write to him at Christmas. He does not answer. I intend to keep doing it, and I am aware that continuing to send a man money he has told me he will destroy is at least partly for me, and I have decided to do it anyway with that understood.

It is the least dramatic object in this entire account. It is a printed spreadsheet with handwriting on it.

Two years ago I stood on a rooftop terrace above San Francisco and a man handed me a glass of wine and asked what I was thinking, and I said, just an old mirage — the view’s better here.

I liked that line. I had been holding it for a while, honestly. I said it and we drank to the truth and I thought: that’s the end of the story, and I am the person who walked out of it clean.