What I am saying is that for the twenty-three months between the ruling and the first payment, I was a woman who had won four million dollars in a public court decision that anybody could look up, and who was earning sixty-one thousand dollars a year, and who could not have covered a dental emergency without a credit card.

People treated me as wealthy.

Two people I had known for years became strange with me.

And Patricia Salgado’s advice, which she gave me on the day of the decision and which I followed to the letter, was: “Do not change one single thing about how you live until money is in your hand.

Not one.

Because the ruling is a fact about him and the money is a fact about the world, and there is a corridor between them that is longer than anybody tells you.”

Part Thirty-One: The Deed