I watched him actually run the arithmetic behind his eyes — weighing which answer would serve him, searching for the version of remorse most likely to make me drop the charges — and the very fact that there was arithmetic to run was the whole answer.

You do not compute your way to genuine sorrow.

The computation is proof of its absence.

He stood there doing math about his own contrition, and in the length of that pause I got the cleanest confirmation I could have asked for: that his apology, like Florence’s kneeling, was a transaction, an offer calibrated to a price, and that the man had not spent one honest minute grieving what he’d done to me for its own sake.

He was only sorry it had turned out to be expensive.