Just whether or not it pays

Here's the test the entire Justice quarter has been pointing at. You stay late to fix a colleague's error and they never know you did it. You're fair to the customer who'll never come back. You give the honest answer that costs you the easy approval. None of it pays. No one's keeping score. The relationship is one you'll never be repaid in. Do you do the just thing anyway?

That is the keystone, and it's the hardest one. Marcus reasoned his way to it from the ground up: "Consider that everything which happens, happens justly... whatever thou doest, do it in conjunction with this, the being good, and in the sense in which a man is properly understood to be good" (Meditations 4.10, Long). The justice isn't a transaction you enter hoping for terms. It's just what a decent person does — built into the doing, not bolted on for the payoff.

This reframes everything from the past twelve weeks. Carrying your share, giving credit, letting the grudge go — none of it was ever an investment with an expected return. It was the conduct of a good colleague, owed whether or not anyone ever notices or repays it.