I looked up. Mr. Ellis, my realtor, stood there in a ridiculous hat with ear flaps. “I bring news,” he said, and handed me a manila envelope. “No panic. Good news.”
Inside: the final settlement statement for the condo sale, a crisp IRS acknowledgment that the 1099‑S reporting had processed cleanly, and a note in his careful pen: “You did this without mess. Not many can. Proud of you.”
“It wasn’t clean on my end,” I said.
“It never is,” he said. “But clean on paper matters. You protected yourself.”
After he left, I turned the envelope over and wrote three lines on the back:
Everything that is not a gift is a contract. If you don’t say the terms out loud, the other person will, eventually—and they won’t be yours.
Receipts are love letters to your future self. Keep them.
No is a full sentence. “No, because” is a policy manual.
I taped it inside my file cabinet—my own small constitution.
February brought board meetings and a night class I’d signed up for on a whim: woodworking at a maker space in the West Bottoms. “Why?” Amber texted.