This is the thing the reputation-obsessed never quite believe until it happens to them: that a good name is not a fortress but a facade, and a facade protects you only until someone looks behind it, at which point its very grandeur becomes the measure of your hypocrisy.

The Abernathys had thought their reputation would protect them.

It was, in the end, the thing that had the furthest to fall.

And underneath it, all along, indifferent to the whole glittering performance, sat the paper — the boring, unglamorous, un-photographed record of what the money actually did — waiting to be read.

They had spent millions curating how things looked.

Alistair had spent nothing curating how things were, only made sure it was written down.

And when the two finally met, in a downtown bank, the looking lost to the being, instantly and completely, as it always eventually does.