It dissolves the distance between who you believe yourself to be and what you will actually do when your mother needs medicine you cannot buy.

I do not offer that as an excuse for what I agreed to.

I offer it only as the truth of the state I was in, so that you understand I did not walk into that office a cynical man looking to profit from an old woman.

I walked in a frightened son who had run entirely out of better options, which is a different thing, though not, I would learn, a cleaner one.

I do not tell it this way to soften it.

I have made my peace with the fact that I did something wrong when I took that money, that no amount of context turns a lie into a virtue.

What I have also come to understand, though, is that the story did not end at the moment of my worst choice, and that a person is not defined by the single lowest thing they agree to, but by what they do afterward, by whether they let the wrong choice harden into the person they become or whether something in them turns and grows toward the light instead.

I made a bad choice out of desperation, and then I was given the rarest of gifts, which is the chance to become, inside that bad choice, someone better than the choice itself.

Not everyone gets that chance.

I have never stopped being grateful that I did, or that the one who gave it to me was Nora.

Chapter 2 — The Offer

The advertisement was placed by a high-priced corporate law firm, and it was vague in the way that expensive things are often vague, promising good money for discreet personal work and asking for nothing but a phone number.

I answered it the way a drowning man reaches for anything that floats, without thinking too hard about what it was.

The meeting that followed took place on a high floor of a downtown office tower, in a room with a view and a mahogany desk and a man behind it who did not stand when I came in.