It is a bleak, airless way of living to see the world, and it is also, I have realized, the exact way of seeing that makes a man capable of murdering his wife for money — because if everything is a transaction, then a person is only an asset, and an asset that is worth more dead than alive is simply a bad investment to be liquidated.

Marcus’s theory was the opposite, and he lived it so plainly that I almost missed it.

He believed that you do the right thing because it is the right thing, full stop, and that the moment you start doing it for the gratitude, you are no longer doing the right thing at all — you are only running Victor’s transaction with better manners.

He broke down a steel door for a woman who had ruined his life, and then he refused, actively refused, to let her owe him for it, because owing was the whole disease he refused to carry.