In its place was the particular disorientation of a person discovering, in his mid-thirties, that the ground he’d been standing on his whole life had belonged to someone else.

I did not feel triumphant, seeing it.

I felt, if anything, a distant sadness for the sheer waste of it — that a grown man had built his entire sense of himself on money he hadn’t earned and a superiority he hadn’t merited, so that the moment both were withdrawn there was almost nothing of him left standing in the doorway.

But the sadness didn’t slow me down.

I had spent six years letting my sympathy for him override my sense of myself, and I was done doing that.

I could feel sorry for the hollowness of him and still hand him the folder.