His father had opened the folder expecting nothing and found a number, and had laughed, thinking it a joke, and had looked around the table for me, and the server had explained, gently, that I had already settled my own portion and gone.

And then, Derek said, his voice climbing and cracking, there had been a scramble, an ugly scrambling moment in a nice restaurant, because it turned out that a table of people who could order a dry-aged ribeye with a lobster tail on top without blinking could not, among them, easily produce two thousand three hundred dollars when the bill was actually theirs.

He said the number like an accusation, as though the figure itself were a thing I had done to him rather than a thing his family had ordered and I had, this once, declined to quietly make disappear.

His brother had maxed a personal card.