The taste appeared, elaborate and sudden, only when the dime was mine, and vanished again the instant the check became theirs, which should have told me everything and for two years told me nothing.

I could have absorbed the money.

That is the part people miss when I tell this story, and it is the part that took me longest to make peace with.

I earned well.

The dinners, even the extravagant ones, did not threaten my mortgage or my retirement or my ability to buy myself the things I wanted.

If the arrangement had cost me only money, I might have gone on paying it for another decade and called it generosity and never examined it at all.

Money I had.