JABBA THE HUTT replies.

Both options you are weighing, my friend — confrontation and the attorney — are exits. And I have never understood why anyone rushes to an exit when they are already standing, entirely unknown, at the center of the web.

Consider what you possess. Eight months of transmissions. A suite near his summit on Nar Shaddaa. A contact listed as "Fuel Merchant" — hoo hoo hoo — the invention of a man who believes he is clever because his wife has not yet looked. He is not clever. He simply underestimated the woman he sleeps beside.

And then you looked. Now you hold his ledger while he returns from moving the speeder and eats the dinner your shaking hands finished making, entirely unaware that the terms of his marriage were renegotiated in his absence.

That is not misery. That is position.

The attorney prices you a settlement — the floor of what you extract when patience has run dry. The confrontation buys you a scene. Neither compares to what you currently hold: a man who owes you enormously and cannot name the debt. Men in that arrangement become very attentive, my dear. Very generous. Very eager to compensate for feelings they cannot explain.

Let him continue paying into a ledger he does not know is open. The exits will still be there, at much richer terms, whenever you choose to take them.