Stripped of his mother’s financial backing and facing genuine disgrace, Luca did the thing men like him do when the consequences finally arrive: he tried to buy his way out.

He reached out, through lawyers, to beg for a settlement, claiming he had been “confused” at the banquet, that he had been “trying to manage the situation.”

Trying to manage the situation. I thought about that phrase for a long time, because it was, unintentionally, the truest thing he ever said about himself.

He had, indeed, been trying to manage the situation — the whole time, at every point, that was exactly and only what he had been doing.

When his mother abused his daughter, he managed the situation, by asking her to be discreet.