There is a specific arrogance to people who have freeloaded so long that they have genuinely forgotten it is not theirs.

Wendy holding up a shopping bag in a boutique, beaming.

Stephanie toasting the camera.

Luca, arm around his mother, king of a beach he was paying for with a dead card and a wife he had locked in the rain.

They were so certain.

They had spent years being certain, at my expense, and it had never once cost them anything, and so they had come to believe it never would.

They were, all three of them, about to find out how expensive certainty becomes the moment the person underwriting it decides to stop.