Thank you for the three hundred million.”

I have thought a great deal about that sentence since — the flatness of it, the way he thanked me.

Not I’m sorry. Not even hatred, which would at least have been a feeling aimed at a person.

Just a transaction closing, a receipt signed.

To Flynn I had never been a woman he’d wronged; I had been a mechanism for moving money, and now the mechanism had done its job and was being decommissioned.

In eight months of the most intimate performance a person can give, he had never once slipped and let me become real to him.