For the first time in years, the money you touched did not smell like fear. It smelled like order. Spreadsheets. Affidavits. Discovery logs. Legitimate invoices. You rented a small one-bedroom in Montrose with crooked floorboards and windows too wide for standard curtains, and when the leasing agent asked whether you wanted beige blinds included, you almost laughed again.
“No,” you said. “I’ll choose my own.”
Diego called once more that winter.
Not from his number. From a prepaid phone that flashed UNKNOWN and could have belonged to any ghost. You almost let it die, but something in you wanted to hear what ruin sounds like when it finally becomes reflective. It turned out to sound mostly tired.
“They froze everything,” he said without greeting. “The company, the lines, all of it.”
You stood in your new kitchen stirring soup you’d made from scratch because you wanted your home to smell like something other than panic. “That’s unfortunate.”
“You knew what that would do.”
“Yes.”
Silence.
Then, quieter, “I never thought you’d go this far.”
You looked at the rain tracing the edges of your window.
The sentence hung there, obscene in its familiarity. As though the scale of your response was the moral event, not the years of theft, humiliation, and identity misuse that made it necessary. As though your job had always been to stay within the emotional budget he approved.
“You went first,” you said.
