There was a hard lesson in it about the kind of protection that status buys — that it is not loyalty, and it is not love, and it lasts exactly as long as you are convenient and not one second past.

I had once envied people who moved through the world inside that kind of protection.

Watching Tiffany run for the valet through a crowd that would not meet her eyes, I stopped envying them for good.

I would rather have what I had built, which was small and unglamorous and could not be taken away by a change in the wind: a daughter, a paid-off debt, a home with no contempt in it, and not one relationship in my life that depended on my being useful to keep.

Chapter 11 — The Reality He Built