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I have run it back four times and I still cannot work out whether that is the most honest thing anybody has ever done to me or the most expensive, and the answer is that those are the same answer, and that is the woman, entire.

Episode four alone has done ninety million minutes.

Coby and Stitch have made eleven pieces of content about the reissue in nine days. One of them is a forty-minute breakdown of Ghorlan's shelter joinery with a whiteboard, and it is wrong in six places, and it has four million views, and Stitch messages me at one in the morning to ask if he can send Ghorlan a whiteboard.

Renny Doust runs a card room in the back of a marine supply and has for nineteen years.

I drive out on Day 28 with a cashier's check for sixty thousand dollars, which is the appearance fee, wired on Day 22, and I sit down across from him at a card table at eleven in the morning with the room empty and the coffee urn going.

He is sixty-one. He has been a lot of things to me and one of them was patient, and patience from Renny Doust is a line item with interest on it.

"Ninety-one," he says.

"Sixty today." I slide it. "Twenty-five in three weeks from the reunion, contracted, I'll sign the assignment. The last six by the end of the year and I'll put it in writing and you can hold whatever you want to hold."

He looks at the check for a while.

"You went on television," he says.

"I did."

"My sister has that show on every night." He turns the check over. "You lied about an elk."

"I did."

"On camera. Twice." He puts it in his shirt pocket. "First time for money and the second time for free."

"That's about the shape of it."

"Huh." He pours me a coffee I have not asked for. "Junie. Sit a minute."

I sit a minute.

"There's four guys at this table who'd stake you tomorrow," Renny says. "You're the best read at any table you've ever sat at and everybody in this room understands that, and you have a face on you now that four million people are extremely sentimental about, which in a cash game is a whole second bankroll. I'll go a hundred. Right now. Standard split, and we tear up the paper."

And there it is: a hundred thousand dollars, and a chair, and the only thing I have ever been indisputably good at.

Fourteen months ago I would have had the pen out of his hand.

"No," I say.

"Sleep on it."

"I have." The coffee is terrible. I drink it anyway. "For fourteen months, Renny. I'm good at that table because I read everybody and I let nobody read me, and I called that a skill for eleven years, and what it actually got me was a backer, an agent, and not one person on this earth who could describe me accurately."

He works his jaw.

"Six by the end of the year," he says.

"By the end of the year."

"You come and eat here sometimes anyway."

"I will."

The offer comes on Day 29 at four in the afternoon, on paper, by courier, because Delia Prine is a woman who understands that a thing you can hold in your hand is worth eleven emails.

The show is called HOLDFAST: NORTH SITE. It is twelve episodes. It is me and a rotating cast of first-timers, dropped in cold, and I take them through the twenty-one days I have already done, and the whole engine of it is the trestle-word, every night, on camera, with people who have never named an error out loud in their lives.