"What if she fights me in the divorce for half of what I still owe you?" he asked.
"Then you fight with documents," I said. "I will provide them. Every highlighted line. Every date. The cake is not in the file. The eighteen thousand dollars is."
He almost laughed. It came out as air.
Sunday arrived with rain and the sound of suitcases on the stairs.
Sloan did not speak to me. She carried her boxes of cosmetics past my deadbolted study with her chin high and her eyes wet with fury that wanted to be called hurt. Harrison loaded the car in a silence that felt heavier than shouting. I stood in the foyer — the same foyer where they had arrived on that Tuesday in September with their promise of a few months — and I held the written agreement Harrison had signed the night before, his signature looking like the handwriting of a man signing a cast on his own arm.
Fourteen months to repay eighteen thousand dollars in installments. First payment due in thirty days. No access to any of my accounts, ever again. An acknowledgment, in ink, that the withdrawals had been made without my informed consent.
Sloan called it cruelty from the passenger seat. Harrison did not correct her. He hugged me at the curb in the rain, briefly, like a man hugging a sentence he has not yet learned how to read, and then they drove away toward a short-term rental Sloan's sister had reluctantly offered, and the house on Maple Court exhaled for the first time in a year.