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"Tomorrow, I go handle the last of it."

"Not by yourself."

"Birdie—"

"I'm coming. I'll stand outside. I'll hold Gerald. I don't care." She squeezes my hands. "You don't do the scary part alone anymore.”

And God help me, I let somebody help.

"Fine," I say. "You can hold Gerald."

Sal Petrakis runs his business out of the back of a private investigator’s office on Delano, behind bulletproof glass and a beaded curtain.

I've come through that curtain a handful of times in the last year and every time I did it the same way. Head down, envelope out, apology already loaded, making myself as small and quiet and apologetic as a person can be while handing a dangerous man money.

Today, I've got my red on.

Birdie's out on the sidewalk hugging Gerald to her chest. "Me and my emotional support houseplant will be right here," she says. "Fifteen minutes and I'm calling somebody. I don't know who. Gerald will back me up."

"You're not going to need to call anybody."

"I know." She does not look like she knows. "Go be terrifying."

The bell over the door is cheerful in a way nothing else in the place is. Behind the glass, a bored kid buzzes me back in with a quick glance, and then I'm through the beaded curtain and into the hot, smelly office that has starred in most of my nightmares for a year.

Sal looks harmless. Reading glasses, a cardigan, a desk covered in the neat paperwork of a man who keeps good books. He glances up, ready to deal with whoever's interrupting his afternoon, and takes in my red lipstick and the way I'm standing. His head tilts the smallest amount, as if he’s puzzled. I get it. The woman before him who used to apologize to his carpet is in his doorway, and she isn't apologizing to anything this time.

"Agnes," he says, like he's testing whether it's still my name.

"Sal."

"You look different."

"I feel different." I sit down without being asked, which I have never done, and set my bag in my lap. "I'm here to close it out. All of it. Today."

He chuckles without smiling. "That so?"

He makes a show of it by pulling a folder out of a big pile. He opens it, runs a finger down a column, and lets me watch him tally. It's theater, it's how he keeps people scared, and I know theater when I see it now. For weeks, I sat on the other side of a screen with three of the most powerful men in the city, all of them acting like they were in charge while I was the one running the room. A man thinking he has control and a man who actually has it look identical, right up until you stop being afraid of him. Then the whole sorry act falls apart.

"With the carrying costs," he says, "and those late months back in the spring, you're at thirty-two hundred to walk out clean."

Fuck off.

A year ago, that number would have stopped my heart. A year ago, I'd have accepted it, because he said it, and because I'd already decided a man like Sal got to be right about anything he wanted and a woman like me got to say thank you.

Not today, Satan.

"You want to talk about what I owe?" I open my own folder and set it on his desk with every payment, every date, a photo of each envelope before it ever left my hand, and I say the damn number out loud because it no longer has power over me. "Twenty-three thousand, four hundred dollars. That's what my sister and I signed for. And you know what, Sal? That's the number I couldn't make myself say out loud for a year. I lost sleep over this shit. I let it run my whole life."

I say it to his face, flat, like a weather report.

"Sal, I've paid all of it but sixteen hundred and forty of this. Principal and the interest we actually agreed to, to the dollar. Your ‘carrying costs’ are bullshit. Those late months in the spring were paid. Here’s my receipt with your own initials on it. I brought the sixteen-forty balance that we owe, and not a cent more."

The office goes quiet. This is the part I learned, in my nine-dollar slip, running a room full of men who each thought he was in charge of me—you don't fill the silence. You let it sit there and work for you.

Sal looks at my folder. Then at me. And I watch him decide whether I'm worth the trouble. For a woman who's stopped being scared, who writes everything down, who brought her sister for backup, and walked in with a hardness in her face he doesn't recognize and doesn't like, leaning on her is a bigger pain in the ass than a “carrying cost” is worth. He knows it.

So I give him a way out, because Diablo taught me that too. A man folds a lot faster when you let him do it without losing face.