I opened the wrong door on the fiftieth floor and saw what the most powerful woman in the company had been hiding — the next morning she put eighty-five thousand dollars on the desk.

I had observed exactly that. Eleven hours earlier. On a carpet.

So I said no.

I want to be accurate about this because two people have since described me as principled and I was not feeling principled. I was terrified.

I said: “I’ll do the job. I’ll be on that floor, I’ll do the buckles, I’ll never say a word to anybody as long as I live, and you don’t have to pay me a dollar for it.

“I’m not signing that.”

And she said, “Then there’s nothing to discuss.”

And I said, “All right,” and I got up.

And I got about four steps and she said: “Why.”

And I said the only true thing I had.

“Because if they find out one line of it’s wrong, everything else you’ve got goes with it. You don’t need a fifth statement, ma’am. You need one that holds.”

Nine days.

That is how long it took her to ring me. The thirty-first of October, at about half eleven at night, on my own phone, while I was on forty-eight.