And this was the boundary that would define everything that followed, the one Marlowe drew with perfect clarity at the very start: the money and the relationship were entirely separate things, and no quantity of the former would ever purchase the latter.

It was a crucial distinction, and one that a lesser or a more desperate woman might have blurred — because it would have been easy, and in some ways reasonable, to let the restitution soften her, to feel that a man paying back everything he owed had bought himself at least a hearing.

Marlowe refused to let the two connect.

What Desmond owed Posy financially, he owed as a matter of law and simple decency, and paying it earned him nothing beyond the meeting of a basic obligation; a father is supposed to support his child, and doing the thing you were always supposed to do is not a favor for which access is the reward.

Whether he would ever be allowed into Posy’s actual life was a separate question entirely, to be answered not by his checkbook but by his conduct over time, and to be answered by Posy herself when she was old enough to weigh in.

Marlowe would take the money — she was not too proud for that, and Posy deserved the stability it bought — but she would not let it become leverage, would not let Desmond or anyone else construct the equation in which financial restitution obligated emotional access.