In the severance documents was a provision forgiving the outstanding balance on the note.

Twenty-four thousand one hundred dollars and change.

I asked Ruben Duran to strike it.

He said, “Emmett, that’s twenty-four thousand dollars.”

I said I knew.

He said, “Are you doing this because it’s right or because you want to be able to say you did it?”

Which is the most useful question anybody asked me in three years, and I sat with it for two days, and the answer was that it was about sixty percent the first and forty percent the second, and I did it anyway, and I paid it off over the following nineteen months, and the last payment cleared on a Tuesday and I did not tell anybody, which was possibly the forty percent settling its account.

I saw Vivienne Bramhall once more.