The view is better here. That part was true and remains true.

But I was not clean, and it was not the end, and the thing I called a mirage had sixty-three people standing in it that I had not counted, and two of them in a rented duplex in Ohio, and one of them at twenty-two in a six-month placement.

I didn’t find any of it. Not one piece. I found the parts that helped me win and then I stopped looking, and everything in the last year came to me — from a woman in accounts payable who noticed an uncashed check, from a passing remark over eggs, from a name in a public database I could have searched from my kitchen at any point in twenty-eight months.

The truth doesn’t arrive because you toast it. It sits in a county recorder’s office in Ohio for two years waiting for somebody to type a name in.

So: the list. Fifty-two paid, four refused, eleven returned. One man in Charlotte.

It’s not much of a closing image. It doesn’t chime.

End of Part Two.