His words wounded me deep. So ungrateful. He wouldn’t accept it, even as a gift. Of course, paying off my debt was never mentioned at all.

I used to look up to him. “He taught me everything I know,” I used to say.

Him turning his back on me like that changed me somehow. Nothing mattered no more. Not my life. Nothing.

So that very night I buried it deep on the side of his goddamned house. Chances are nobody’d find it, but if they did it’d be on him.

But I marked it, in case he changed his mind.