Behind the immaculate surface — the good job, the easy manner, the groceries carried up the neighbors’ steps — he had run up something over four hundred thousand dollars in gambling losses and a tangle of bad offshore investments, and the people he owed were not the patient kind.

He had been circling the drain for the better part of a year, and I had not seen a single sign of it, because he was very, very good at surfaces.

That was the word my lawyer used, going through the statements — surfaces — and it has stayed with me.

Ronan lived entirely on them.

The confident handshake, the remembered birthday, the grocery bags carried up the neighbor’s steps where the neighbor could see: these were not kindnesses, I understood now, so much as maintenance, the constant upkeep of a facade with nothing behind it.

For a year he had been quietly insolvent, lying to me across the dinner table every single night, and the performance had not so much as flickered.