I am at my most valuable in the months everybody else is avoiding

What I am good at is the pile of official documents that everybody has and nobody opens. Filings. Insurance. The letter from an agency that has been on the counter since November. The forty minutes on hold. I do it quickly, correctly, and without needing to be thanked, and I find the whole business genuinely calming, which people find strange.

Fifty one, Queens, four years in. Two arrangements, both with women who ran small businesses and had reached the point where the drawer would not close.

What I want is to be handed a category of somebody's life and told to make it disappear. Not to advise. Not to explain what I found. To handle it, report that it is handled, and be told whether it was done the way she wanted.

The arrangement I want around that is fixed. A set evening, a standing list, and correction when I get it wrong, which I do, because everybody does with paperwork.

Now the part I have to say every time. I will not accept anything for this and I do not want expenses covered. I do this work for money elsewhere and it is completely different, and the difference is precisely that nothing comes back. If a figure is mentioned at any point I will step out of the conversation. Nothing physical, no play, no titles. I want to sit at a table in somebody's apartment and do the thing she hates.