In October he made me sign a piece of paper.

An actual agreement, three-quarters of a page, with a start date and a rate and a notice period, which he had a lawyer draft, and which I thought at the time was an absurd formality between two people in a kitchen.

It was not a formality.

It was the single most protective thing anybody did for me in two years and he did it in the seventh week and told me nothing about why.

Because eighteen months later, in a deposition, a lawyer named Gordon Pell spent forty minutes trying to establish that I had been living with Arthur Vance as his partner since September, and the answer was a signed employment agreement dated the fourteenth of October, with W-2 filings behind it, and forty minutes of a good lawyer’s work went into a hole in the ground.