She finally opened the folder.

“I went to Stanford. Four years, out of that account. I can’t give that back — I’ve tried to think of a way and there isn’t one, the money is a building I sat in and a degree I’ve been using ever since.”

She slid the paper across the desk. A cashier’s check.

**ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY THOUSAND AND 00/100.**

“So I rebuilt it,” she said. “I opened a separate account when I was twenty-three. I’ve been putting money in it every month for thirteen years. Some months it was two hundred dollars. When I got the VP job it was more. It cleared a hundred and eighty in October and I sat on it for three months because I couldn’t work out how to walk in here.”

I looked at the check for a long time.