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The number is three hundred and twenty thousand dollars for the first season.

There is a handwritten line on the cover page in green ink:

It is a good show and you should say no and I will send a better one. D.P.

My agent calls nine times.

I take the ninth one on the fire escape of a rental I am paying for by the week, with the sun going down over a parking lot, and Bibi talks for six straight minutes about generational opportunity and then stops for air.

"It's a good show," I tell her.

"It is a great show, Junie, it's your show, it's built out of the exact thing that..."

"That's the problem."

She goes quiet.

"They'd give me twelve first-timers," I say. "Twelve people who lied on an application the way I lied on an application, and I'd sit across a fire from them every night and get them to name the thing they're most ashamed of on camera, because I'm the only person alive who's proved that plays. And I'd be good at it, Bibi. I'd be really, really good at it. I'd read every single one of them by Day 3 and I'd steer them straight into it, and it would be true, and it would be theirs, and somebody in a truck would cut it."

"So you take the show and you protect them."

"There is no protecting anybody from a cut. That's the thing I stood in a field and said out loud." The sun goes behind the parking structure. "It took a man twenty-one nights to teach me to say one true thing without an angle on it. I'm nine days into having that. I'm not selling it in week two."

Long silence.

"Three hundred and twenty thousand dollars," Bibi says.

"I owe ninety-one and I've got a plan for eighty-five of it."

"That is not a plan, that is a hole."

"It's my hole. It's the first one I've ever climbed out of with my own hands and I would like to finish, please."

She breathes out. Then she laughs, once, in a way I have never gotten out of her in three years.

"God," she says. "You're going to be so poor."

"Genuinely."

"I'll tell them no."

"Tell them thank you and no. She sent it in green ink."

Neve Okimoto starts at a documentary unit in Portland on Day 30, which is today, which she tells me by text at seven in the morning with an exclamation point in it, and the sentence has forty-one words in it, and I have read it eleven times because for eighteen days that woman communicated with me exclusively through printed cardstock.

She sends a photograph of her new desk. There is a mug on it.

There is no prompt card anywhere in the frame.

He calls at nine most nights.

There is one bar of signal at the house and it lives in the northeast corner of the upstairs hall, which is where the buckets are, so every conversation I have had with Ghorlan Ostvek in nine days has had a soundtrack of water hitting a plastic pail at irregular intervals.

He talks about the sill. He talks about the scarf joint and the pegs and about a supplier in Coldbrook who has cedar shingle at a price that offends him. On the fourth night he talked for four minutes about a chisel that belonged to his grandfather and I sat on a fire escape with my forehead on the railing and let him.

Neither of us has said one word about the Flat.

There is a thing he told me he had to say, out loud, in a room with no lens in it, and he has not said it on a phone, and I have not asked him to, because he is a man who builds and a man who builds does not put a joint in badly to get it done Tuesday.