The advance as a note.

The waiver on the waiting period.

The formulary check.

I got every single thing I thought to ask for, and I did not think to ask the one that mattered.

Part Five: The Choreography

We worked in her office with the doors locked for four hours a day for nine days, and I want to describe what that actually involved, because it was not a montage and because the competence in it was mine and I am not going to be modest about it at this distance.

The public version of this — I have seen it, somebody wrote it up years later and got most of it wrong — has me as a muscular man bearing half her weight on my arm while she strides heroically across marble.