Chapter 1 — The Fifty-Dollar Bill

“Pick it up.

For someone living off garbage, fifty dollars still goes a long way, doesn’t it?”

I shouted it out the window of my pristine pickup truck, with a cold, smug malice that makes me physically sick to remember now.

I have gone over that sentence a thousand times since, the way you press a bruise to see if it still hurts.

It always still hurts.

It always will.

It was raining hard over Chicago that Tuesday afternoon, the kind of gray, relentless rain that turns the whole city the color of wet concrete.

I was stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic under an overpass, in a foul mood because a board meeting had run two hours long, and I was thirty-nine years old and certain of a great many things.

I owned a lucrative chain of high-end furniture showrooms.

I drove a truck that cost more than most people’s cars and houses combined.

And I carried the particular arrogance of a man who believes that because he has money, he can no longer be fooled by anyone.

Then I saw her.

A thin, fragile woman in a torn blue raincoat was working through the heavy bags beside a row of commercial dumpsters, sorting plastic bottles and wet cardboard into a sack.

A gust of wind knocked her hood back and showed me her face.

It was Lucy.

My ex-wife.

The woman I had accused, three years earlier, of sleeping with one of my key suppliers and stealing more than two hundred thousand dollars from my company.