Page 83 of Knocked Up

"How much?"

"Nineteen thousand four hundred."

"Say the rest of it."

"There isn't a rest of it," Beckett said. "That's the whole amount. Three payments, a month apart, through the dog's account. If I'd put it on the business you'd have seen a name you didn't recognize and called the bank. If I'd put my own name on it you'd have sent it back."

"You've thought about this a lot."

"Look at the board," I said.

He looked at the board.

"Read clause two out loud."

"Tessa."

"You read it out loud in December when I asked you to, in a flat voice like a lineup, and then you initialed it. So read it."

He read it out loud, all of it, and he did not rush it.

"When did you make the first payment?"

"The fourth of November."

"And when did you initial that board?"

"The nineteenth of December."

"So there was nineteen thousand four hundred dollars of your money in my business," I said, "when you put your initials next to a sentence that says nobody in this house pays rent in money."

"Yes."

"Say it properly."

"I initialed a clause I was already in breach of," Beckett said. "I knew it when I did it. I did it anyway."

I had to go and stand somewhere else for a second.

"Do you know what I have thought every day since last September? When I sat on a bucket in a supply room. When I took the Sunday shifts in Aurora and did not tell my brother. When I stood in that lot in November with three tests in a bag in my coat. When I did the numbers in my head and thought, all right, you can do this. Because you have kept this building alive for nine years on your own two hands and you did not lose it."

"I know."

"You do not know, because it isn't true. I have been walking around inside a thing that isn't true since the fourth of November." My voice was doing something and I let it. "That is the only thing my mother left me that isn't a building. I kept it open. And you took that and you put it in a dog's account."

"I didn't take it from you."

"You bought it."

"That's not…"

"Then what is it?" I said. "Because from where I'm standing a man who has known me since I was twenty-one looked at the one thing I've got. And decided he'd rather be the reason it's still here than let me be."

He stood in the middle of that kitchen with his hands down at his sides and did not defend himself. It would have been easier for me if he had.

"You'd have said no," he said.

"Yes."