Anything can be arranged.

"On paper this is the best job I'm ever gonna get. Pays well and good benefits and my boss doesn't care what I do as long as I produce, which I can do with like half my brain tied behind my back. I could spend half the day trading stocks, watching Netflix, no one cares. There are jobs that mean something and I think what if I just peaced out and never came back? I could get one of those meaningful jobs, and yeah it'd be more hard work and less pay but I wouldn't feel dead inside. There's this nagging bitch voice in me that just knows it. But I've got kids and a wife who isn't ever going back to work. I gotta shut that voice up. Anything you could do to make that voice sound stupid or wrong would go a long way." — Project Manager

"[NAME REDACTED] is one of a handful of potential swing votes...he has no desire to vote for this. But the nihilism around here right now is like a fever. It's contagious. It scrambles your brain. You're sure you see things that aren't there. Can you guys soften him up a little? He doesn't really want to believe nothing matters. If you could just get him to second-guess that cynical certainty. He's not an unreasonable guy. I'm a junior staffer, don't have much money, if I had to I could try to get others to chip in, but I'm not sure how many people you want aware of your involvement? If you get involved. Which I hope you do, assuming you exist at all. But [REDACTED] says you're legit and helped out with a thing a while back. So here's a coin in the well, I guess." — Legislative Assistant

"She had always been nicer to me than other girls, had always seemed happy to talk to me. Sought me out actually on many occasions. I am not tragically ugly, just not as good looking as the guys who typically presented themselves to her, and whom her friends--she being uncommonly beautiful--obviously expected her to date. It would have been awkward for her to be with me, and I understood that, but I always felt, always, from the very first time she asked me to help her study, there was something. A spark is a bad metaphor, or a sappy and cliche meteaphor but a good one actually, because that's what it was: the briefest little flicker of something, but it was there. I saw it clearly but too fast to capture. When I flirted with her, a little hesitation, a little knowing hesitation. But she never turned me away either. It always seemed she liked me, but something prevented her.

"And then the clock ran out. She married her boyfriend. A Xerox copy of her father, I thought, exactly the person she was supposed to marry. A photograph of his father looked like her father. Behold, the future, I joked when she told me, and she was cold after that. Had children, stopped working, stayed home, and was packed up to waste away in a stone and plaster suburban mansionette.

"I moved on, of course. Dated women, told a few I loved them, meant it in the desperate way. But I wondered. When things went wrong and I sat somewhere in the wreckage of some new disaster, I would wonder if she ever slumped in some uncomfortable midcentury modern furniture wondering if she should have given me a chance. I wondered if she loved me but couldn't bring herself to live with what that might mean.

"And then I met Overman. It seemed like such a stupid proposition to pay someone for this. A single sheet thumbtacked to the cork board near the mailboxes in the apartment building, alongside the comic sans notices for hopeful dogwalkers, yoga classes, lost cats, offers to just call someone named Ronnie if I wanted to lose weight fast and make money doing it. A notice that stood out for its austerity. No proof, no claims of money back guarantees or free trials. No testamonials in quotation marks. It offered only The Truth. And an email address.

"The reply I got was simple: 'How it works: You explain the thing you've always wanted to believe but never could. You will answer a number of questions, I go investigate, and tell you the truth of what I find.' Did I have to pay upfront, I emailed back? 'No. Your bill is due when I deliver results.' What if I refuse to pay? 'I will repossess the product, as anyone would expect and view to be fair.' This one seemed too much, but when pressed Overman explained: 'You will know the truth through the evidence I provide. If you don't believe it, it is not the truth, and you need not pay. But should you fail to hold up your end of the agreement, I will wipe out your faith in the evidence and you will be back where you started.'

"For days I sat with the implications of that. I emailed again and said, I'm not sure this seems legit. Thanks for your time, but I think I'll pass. 'Of course. Whether or not you choose to know the truth is all the same to me. Besides, you can always ask her.'

"Now this was obviously alarming. How he, she, it, they knew what I was wrestling with. Overman was right, obviously, I could ask her. But how many times, back when we were so much closer, when we talked, in an instant messenger window (remember those?), almost every day, sometimes when she came back from a night out, a night with her boyfriends, she'd talk to me, last, before she'd go to bed. Even then I couldn't get a straight answer from her. Always a hedge. Look, she'd say, or something like this: you're incredibly special to me. I don't want to ruin what we have by hooking up and having it not work out. Or: You're like a brother to me, you know? Why would she give me a straight answer now?

"How much would it cost, I asked? 'How much is it worth to you?' is what came back. And this I really had to think about. I stalled. What are prices based on, or pegged to? The amount of work you have to do? 'That is not how this works. Who can put a price on the truth other than the person who needs to know it? Come to an honest answer about what it is worth to you to know--to really know, rather than just think or assume or wish--what you want to know. Make an offer.'

"Do we negotiate? 'No. If you are dishonest in your assessment of value, we will will cease all communication with each other. You will be free to pursue your life and the knowledge you seek in any way you see fit, without interference from me.'

"That's mighty white of you, I said. Thinking I could get them on my side with some humor. They didn't respond to this at all. Ever.

"In a certain sense, knowing what she felt about me, for sure, was worth everything. I was stuck in a memory of what I was certain she'd felt for me once that I couldn't be sure was right. To go forward I had to be sure.

"But in another sense, there was an upper limit, obviously. How much could I really afford to gamble and lose? After all, let's say these people could actually do what they claimed, somehow, and the answer came back a yes. She loves me. Has been searching for years for a way out of her loveless marriage without giving up her kids, but just wants to start over, with me, where she should have been all along. And to find that out I give away my life savings. Worth it, perhaps, in the name of love, but then what? We're in a real Gift of the Magi moment is what. On the other hand, if the answer came back no, I had a life to start. So what was the maximum amount of money I could give away and still start a meanignful life? I made some assumptions, and some guesses, did some math, held my breath, and clicked send. After all, if what came back smelled like bullshit I simply wouldn't pay for it if I didn't believe in it.

"Now came a lot of questions. Very, very detailed stuff, and lots of follow-ups, lots of devil's advocate questions, which they explained very clearly as part of the process. Why did I believe a woman who married another man loved me, really, instead? I told him.

"Then if that was true why would I believe she might NOT love me? Why not simply go to her? That one seemed obvious but I answered that, too.

"He asked me to tell him about the last time I saw her, or spoke to her. How did I leave it?

"This was not the most glamorous story ever, and not the most flattering to me, but I was at that point bought in, and I would advise you, whomever you are and whatever you're dealing with, to trust the process. So I sat at my computer one night and just got it all out.

"Her house, is where it was. I was invited. I was in the area, told her in advance, and she said I should come by. She gave me the address, set a time, like we had just seen each other last week. It had been about 2 years or so. I told her I would be in town for work, in a few weeks, if she had any recommendations for restaurants, and she said Oh you should come by! And see the baby! And so I knocked on her door on a Wednesday, in the middle of the day, and he answered instead. The husband. 'Hey, man,' he says, 'come on in.'

"He brought me into the kitchen and offered me a glass of water, and we stood there looking at each other and saying blather like So you've lived here a while now? and So you're in town for work I hear? I looked politely at their furniture and thought it looked like someone's mother's house, with the blanket draped just so over the back of the couch. She came around the corner holding the newborn and her face was, as always, radiant with encouragement.

"'I'm so glad to see you,' she said. And I believed her. I always have. She handed the child off to the husband and hugged me for real. Not politely. Which is not to say impolitely either, just, not a hug you give to your boss's spouse. She pressed herself to me and laid her head on my shoulder. 'It's been forever!'

"I know. You are cringing. Many people have. I have. If I had a nickel for every time a friend clapped me on the shoulder, literally or metaphorically, and said, 'Dude, you gotta let that go,' well if I had that many nickels you'd always be able to hear me coming down the hall. Male and female friends. And I do have Platonic female friends. One went with me to the wedding of these two fine people who were showing me their baby.

"She invited me to her wedding. I was a little surprised, honestly, that the grrom was open to it. Not that I'd had more than half a conversation with the guy, ever, but I had to assume she'd told him who I was and what I wanted. She was not a dishonest person. But I got the email asking for my current address, and then a week or so later, the fat waxy envelope, and I had to keep that thing pinned to my refrigerator for months. And I asked Platonic Female Friend if she'd like to go to the wedding with me, and she eyed me sideways and said, 'Dude, is that still happening? You gotta let that go.'

"'What can I do?' I asked. 'I have to see the end of it.' She's never been anything but kind to me. She was one of my best friends. And Platonic Friend agreed to be my date because the reception was at a very chic private club she'd always wanted to see the inside of.

"Weddings, especially at this size, are no place to have real conversations with the bride or groom. They spend their time like the parents at a child's funeral, or the Nobel prize winner, portioning out their time like Lords on horseback. For the great majority of the evening, I marvelled at her from a distance. Even my date admitted there was a lot there to fall for. 'She looks like something out of another era,' my date whispered as the woman I loved walked up the aisle. 'She's like a long lost Hepburn.' She was, too. Figure, yes, but also the jubilation coming off her like June sunshine, or the curious way that her tightly coiled nervous energy still gave you the impression of grace and ease.

"I got to dance with the bride. My Platonic Friend motioned with her chin and when I looked, there she was next to me, arms spread, offering herself to me for a dance. As we danced she held on firmly. 'I'm glad you made it,' she said. 'It means a lot to me for you to be here.' Later, Platonic Date Friend said to me: 'She does actually look at you like she...it's not what I thought, is it? You know what I thought. And that's not it. I thought you were being...But she looks at you.' My date bit her lip as she drove back toward the city. She agreed to be the DD. She didn't know what to say. Eventually she said, 'It's a lot crueller of her than I imagined, is the last thing I'll say. You deserve to be treated better than that.'

"'I know what you must think of me, for even wanting to come to this,' I told her.

"'Before this,' my Friend said, 'I thought you were just a stupid puppy on this. But now. I don't know. The way she looked at you while you were dancing. I've been your friend for what 5 years now, and we sure as shit don't look at each other that way.'

"The dark freeway was flying by outside, we passed other cars for miles. 'We came so close, just one time,' I told her.

"'You mean...'

"It was her birthday. I told her I'd make her dinner. The boyfriend took her out to dinner at a restaurant. I couldn't have paid for that dinner with 6 weeks work-study, and I didn't expect to see her that night. I just meant, like, some day this week, after class. I was at my computer around 1 in the morning, and the little window pops up, a message from her. I'm back from dinner! I could tell she was a little tipsy, but she wasn't with him. He'd dropped her off and gone home. On her birthday. On a weekend. And I'm like, well what are you doing now? She says, Nothing, really. I need to change. But we can take a walk if you want. So I got in my car and drove over there. She comes out in jeans and a t-shirt, like it was a Sunday afternoon. And she gives me a hug and says "I really wanted to see you on my birthday. I'm glad we got a chance." So we walk, and we talk about whatever. Her dinner, her classes, what she wants to do after she graduates, she's looking for a job. She asks me things, if I'm not sick of schools already, and whether I think the future will be like this: walks around with girls at 1 am? Or if it will be more like adults with jobs, making appointments to see each other a week from Thursday? It was after 2 by the time we were back to her place, standing outside the door, and I just went for it. Asked her if she wanted to come to my place for a birthday drink. I didn't think she'd say yes. She said, "I need to go inside for a minute and get something." And I thought for sure she doesn't come back out. But she did, in a jacket. Okay, she says, one drink. We get in the car and start driving, and she says, "I was wearing really stupid underwear."'

"'Holy shit!' my wedding date says, as we're driving, and almost hits a deer. But we're alive after a little swerve and nearly having a pair of heart attacks.

"'So we have our drink' I went on with the story. 'And she's on the couch looking bored. "It's pretty late," she says. I had no idea what I was doing. "Do you just want to stay here," I asked.

"'"I guess I don't want you to have to drive at this hour anymore," she says. "After drinking especially." So we go to my room.'

"'Holy shit,' my Platonic Friend says again. 'You never told me this.'

"'I never told anyone,' I said. 'My roommate saw me walking out with her and we, swear to God, to this day have never said a word about it to each other. So, we go to my room, and I had no idea what was happening. Total dog-that-catches-the-car scenario. She sits on the edge of the bed and says, So. I tried touching her cheeck, like brushing away a strand of hair, but that's weak tea, and she just laughed a little. So I crawled past her and laid down on the bed, fully clothed, nowhere near drunk now, and my heart is thumping so hard I am sure she can hear it, and then I'm wondering if she thinks its sad or pitiful that I'm this nervous. But she laid down next to me, and then puts her head on my chest. And one leg up over mine, and she seems as comfortable as if this is her favorite way to watch TV. It must have taken me what felt like an hour to look at her. And those eyes. You saw them, you said, tonight. Whle we were dancing. That's how she was looking at me. Not lust, so I'm still not sure if she had it in her head to...you know. But just, happiness. Joy was in her eyes. At 3-something a.m. and me acting like a kid getting lucky on his bar mitzvah. I kissed her. And she was having it. I was completely expecting her not to be having it, and my heart is just wailing away at my ribs with the possibility that she leaps up and says something like Whoa, is THAT what you thought? But she kisses me, too. And she rolls onto her back, away from me, and I think, here it comes. But instead she wiggles out of her jeans. I'm just shadowing her at this point, just seeing how far this is gonna go, and so mine are off, now, too. She uprights herself and straddles me. Pulls my shirt up over my head and lets me fall back and just stare at her. And then, holy of all holies, she pulls her shirt off over her head and that magnificent hair bundles up with the collar and goes tumbling down over her shoulders and had it not been for a few fortifying shots of whiskey in the past hour I'd have maybe run my race before it even started. There she is. 4 solid years of wanting, and she's on top of me in nothing but a pair of lace underwear. I ran my fingertips over that pale skin and reached for her, but then the whole thing vanished like Eurydice in the darkness. She didn't move, was still up there nearly naked, but it was like all the air went dry in the room. Her palms were flat against my chest. And she says, "I'm sorry. I just can't. I thought I was going to. But it's like wanting to have sex with my brother. It's just not gonna work, I don't think." So she rolls off me and wraps her shirt over her breasts and just lies next to me, her arms crossed. And I stared at the ceiling, didn't move for what felt like a whole year.'

"'Shit,' my Platonic Friend said. 'What did you do?'

"'I think I apologized. I drove her home, after a respectful long silence. Averted my eyes while she got dressed and everything. Then I dropped her off and drove back to my own place and dragged my sorry ass upstairs and slept for 2 days straight.'

"Do you see? If it was all in my head I've got a vivid imagination. But these are the kinds of things someone would have to know to interpret what happened the last time I saw her. At her house. With her child. Where she invited me.

"And what happened there was this:

"She hugged me in her kitchen, and said, in a voice that sounded to me draped in genuine appreciation, 'It's so good to see you.'

"Then she took her newborn--so newly born the finance-guy dad was still on paternity leave--back and cradled him, swaddled like a young prince, and asked if I wanted to hold him?

"I did not. 'I'm actually getting over something? I think.' While I imagine he is today a very good-looking young man he was, at that time, just a wrinkly little pinkish brown fart, wrapped up like he was made by Faberge. He began to wail.

"'I think he's hungry,' the husband said.

"'I should probably,' I said.

"'But you just got here,' she said. 'If you get away now it might be ten years before I see you again. I'll just feed him, put him down. Ten minutes.' She left around the same corner she came from and I was back in the capacious silence of their wall-less kitchen/dining/living cavern with the husband, who looked even less eager than before to offer me that water.

"'I don't want to get anything sick,' I said. And having never taken my coat off, with no good signal of preparation to leave, I pulled the zipper a scoshe higher.

"'Well if you have to,' the husband said. 'Good to see you. As always.'

"I left through the door I came in. At the door of the car I considered the width of their house and wondered, briefly, if there was a required distance it had to stretch from the central entrance to qualify officially as having wings.

"One of the curtains swayed and parted, and she was there in the window. The child was pressed to her chest. With two delicate little fingertips of her free hand she touched the windowglass. Was she crying? The distance was too much to be sure.

"All this I told the engineer/s. Dumped it down the mineshaft of their cloak and dagger email address and never heard it hit bottom. Just had to trust it landed somewhere down there. For weeks, I didn't hear a thing back.

"Then, this:

"'If she loves you still, and always did, but is committed to the family she's built, would you want to know?'

"This was difficult. Perhaps the worst of all possible answers. I could see myself doing something reckless. But it was the Truth I was buying, right? I answered, 'It would be rough, but yes, I want the truth.'

"Almost immediately:

"'If she never loved you the way you think, but she just never knew quite what to do with this person she didn't want to hurt and felt sorry for? Would you still want to know?'

"A far easier one. 'Of course. I don't want to harass the poor woman. I just want to understand what it was I was seeing, or not seeing, or misreading, or whatever.'

"And shortly after:

"'And what if she regretted the way she treated you, and barely understood herself, at the time, why she was so ambivalent about someone she knew she loved, but has come to understand, today, that she chose incorrectly? The husband, the children, they are innocent victims, but victims nonetheless of her nervous indecision, and as much as it will absolutely gut her to walk away from them, she sees now that, in her daydreams, she will always return to your walks by the waterside in the dead of night as the time she was freest with herself and someone else. What if she loves you most of all? What if the door to her is open for you? Would you want to know?'

"That one I had to sleep on. It was the object of the whole game, in a sense. When I agonized over proposing a price wasn't this, really, what I wanted to make absolutely sure was not a possibility? The last checkbox before my own life could begin? To be sure that my past failures were entirely behind me? The implications, though, wrung my heart into a knot. There was still the approach. Let's say this was, indeed, the truth. She would not know that I commissioned it, that I knew it. Would I just walk up and knock on her door, suddenly flush with confidence after limping pathetically behind her for over a decade? How does one broach the subject of a radical relaignment of romantic partners? Over beverages? Or beneath thunder and lightning.

"The next morning I replied honestly: "Whatever the truth, I need to know."

"For days, nothing. I re-read the entire record of my exchanges with Overman, hunting for hidden riddles and double meanings or any other clues.

"'In her daydreams, she will always return to your walks by the waterside in the dead of night.' I hadn't told them about that. Not the specific detail of the water. This meant they had spoken to her. And she remembered, and spoke of me in some sort of detail.

"'What if the door to her is open to you?' I read that a dozen times. I recited it like a spell while I walking on concrete sidewalks with my hands shoved down in jacket pockets. The door. To her. Is open. I imagined a sorcerer whispering it in my ear. I imagined her saying it, in her sleep, her husband raising an unsuspicious eyebrow about whatever the hell that could mean.

"Finally, on the 4th day, I received three paragraphs. You will never meet me. And I have redacted and edited this review down so much that I do not believe you could ever deduce my identity, or hers, without some serious hacking chops. So in the interest of explaining eactly what you're buying here, I will just paste the Truth I received in its entirety:

"'It took very little priming for her to bring you into conversation. You are not buried deep in her memories, though she is not wracked daily with wondering either. What she feels towards you could be described as a kind of love. What you saw was a woman on a path through the woods who encounters a divergence. There is, perhaps, another universe in which she has chosen another you.

"'This is not that universe. You met her in her first days, ever, of freedom from her family. And she naturally explored what she might become. She grew up perfectly happy. No resentment there. What she wanted most was to reproduce her own life. A home with many rooms, a financier heading the household, a mother devoted to her children. There would be holidays around a big table and vacations and children who wanted for nothing. Nine days of ten, this vision filled her with warm anticipation. She met her financier. But every tenth day, another fantasy insisted on its time in the moonlight: a life lived as the Queen of One Man's Life. And there you were: thoughtful, and so enamoured of her you listened with genuine interest as she spoke and hashed through her own doubts. You: willing to slaughter your reputation among your peers for one more lap around the park with her. You made her feel a perfectly unique goddess, and this--or rather the feeling it produced--has always for her had its own beauty. Today, in the closet of her soul there is a carefully wrapped statue of the two of you like wild windblown Greek heroes, monumental in your perfection, clothed in nothing but marble and caring for nothing but the embrace into which you've been fashioned. One day out of every ten, she looks on this idea of herself, with you, like a piece of art, and it fills her with a rush of gratitude. But she would never trade places with the statue, any more than you might trade your flesh and blood disappointment to be an ink drawing of a superhero. You are her second-favorite vision of herself.

"'This concludes our agreed upon contract. Payment is expected as in the terms of our arrangement.'

"It sounded as true as anything I could have hoped for. At the end, I asked, 'How did you do it? How did you get her to tell you the truth when she never said anything like that to me?'

"But I never heard from Overman again. Which, to be fair, was never part of our deal. Everything promised, delivered. I paid to the penny. And for the rare person who needs this service, I cannot recommend it highly enough."

— One that got away