“They’ll take the theft flag out of the system,” Kit said. “Quietly. There’ll be no letter, no correction, no statement that it was false. If somebody who already heard it asks, Oakridge says nothing. If Verdant’s report went anywhere else — and we don’t know that it didn’t — that copy stays exactly as it is.”

She leaned back. “It’s a scrub, not a retraction. And you’d be barred from ever saying why.”

Fifty-four thousand dollars.

I want to be plain about what that number was to me, because I think people who have never been poor read a scene like this and assume the choice is easy.

Fifty-four thousand dollars was a car that started every morning. It was Nolan’s teeth. It was a savings account with a number in it that didn’t make me feel ill.

It was, more than anything else, the end of a specific kind of arithmetic I had been doing continuously in the back of my mind since I was twenty-nine years old.