In his mind, he was the protagonist and I was supporting infrastructure, and infrastructure that stops supporting you is not exercising its own agency; it is malfunctioning, betraying, stealing your future.

He never once, in that entire ballroom, asked himself what he had done to arrive at this moment.

He only asked what had been done to him. And that, more than the fraud or the affair or even the strike, was the thing that told me I had been right to do it the way I did.

A man capable of a moment of genuine self-examination might have deserved a private conversation, a chance to make it right.

Lucan had proven, across three years and one final ballroom, that he was constitutionally incapable of imagining himself as anything but the wronged party.

You cannot reason with that.