“I want that sentence off my record,” I said.

“I want it so that the next time some company runs my name through a computer, the computer doesn’t say I’m a thief. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”

Kit Boone looked at me for a second, and something in her face moved, and then it stopped moving and she picked the pen back up.

“That,” she said, “is a remedy. I can work with that.”

Her retainer was two thousand dollars. I had thirty-one hundred in savings — the first real savings of my adult life, two years of scraping, meant for the down payment on a car that had a warranty.

I wrote the check at her desk. My hand did not shake, and I want that in the record too, because two years earlier I had stood at a pawn shop counter and unclasped my grandmother’s locket with hands that shook so hard I couldn’t work the catch.