She swam on Thursdays for a year and a half and then decided, at nine, that swimming was for babies and took up something involving a scooter, and I have never been so pleased to lose an argument.

The note got paid down.

I want to record that because it was the term I fought for and it turned out to be the thing that saved me: eighty-five thousand dollars, at four and a half percent, deducted from my pay at three thousand one hundred a month, documented, with a schedule.

By the time everything came apart I had paid back sixty-one thousand of it, and the existence of that schedule is the reason that nobody was ever able to say, in any proceeding, that I had been bought.

Ceci Duran’s cousin’s number stayed in my wallet through two wallets.