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A still of her, from Day 12, in the rain, laughing at something out of frame, with a chyron under her chin I do not read because reading it will end me. The clerk is nineteen and has the graveyard shift and the entire back wall to herself, and she looks at the screen and then at me and then at the screen.

Her mouth opens.

"Yes," I say. "It is."

"Oh my God."

"How much for the coffee."

She takes my two dollars in a state of religious crisis and I go back out into the rain.

The clause is one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I have it in a photograph on a phone in the cup holder, paragraph four, in the same twelve-point serif as everything else they have ever sent me. Presence at the production location constitutes breach. Liquidated damages provision. My grandmother's roof, four times over, in a paragraph.

I have run the number the whole way down. There is no arrangement of it that works. There is no clever joint here, no way to relieve the load into something else and carry it around the problem, and I have spent nineteen years finding those, and this one has none.

So it comes down to the thing under the number, which is simpler.

I let people be afraid of me because it is easier than letting them past it. She said that at her own table with the buckets going upstairs, in one sentence, without any heat in it, the way she has said everything to me since I was four years old.

A man who has done that his whole life does not get to arrive at the end of something and be careful.

Sunrise comes up gray over the coast range. I make the staging town at nine and Tarn Reach at ten and the logging spur takes ninety minutes in a truck built for it.

Two hours late for a race I quit four days ago.

There is a gate on the spur that has not been there before, a real one, pipe and chain across the road with a kid in a rain shell standing next to a heater and a clipboard.

He is maybe twenty-two. He has a list. I get out and stand in the road, and the top of my head clears the pipe gate by a foot and a half, and I put my hands out in his light and keep them there, because that is twenty-three years of habit and it is going nowhere tonight.

"Sir, this is a closed set."

"Yes."

"There's a live broadcast on the Flat and I can't..." He looks at the list. He looks up. The list goes down about four inches. "Oh."

"Ghorlan Ostvek."

"I have you flagged."

"I would expect so."

He has a headset. His hand goes toward it and stops, and hangs there, and the rain comes off the alders onto both of us while a twenty-two year old with a clipboard runs the same arithmetic I have been running since Coldbrook.

"How much is the fine?" he asks.

"One hundred and fifty thousand dollars."

"Jesus." He swallows. "Are you going to go up there anyway."

"Yes."

He takes his hand off the headset.

"My shift ends at eleven," he says, to nobody, to the trees, and then he walks eight feet away from the gate and turns his back on the road and takes an extremely thorough interest in the heater.

I lift the chain off the post myself.