All the hard work i’m putting into this job is paying off.

The task that took forty minutes in March takes nine now, and the day it dropped below twenty went past without anyone mentioning it, including you. That is what most payoff looks like from inside — not an event, but an absence of difficulty where difficulty used to be.

The other sort arrives later and out of order. The call that comes to you first. The newcomer sent to sit beside you. By then the connection to any particular hard month is impossible to trace, which is why it is worth trusting the accumulation long before the receipt turns up.