The seller’s broker, a man named Gus Peralta who has been doing this for thirty years and who can smell the inside of a room from the corridor, did exactly what my mother predicted.

He used the absence.

He reopened two points that had been closed for a month.

It cost two million eight hundred thousand dollars on a forty-one million dollar purchase price, and it took another eight weeks, and it closed in the first week of December.

It is now the best-performing property I own.

So the dramatic gesture — cancel the deal — the sentence that is the whole of what my colleagues remember about that day, and that I have heard repeated back to me as though it were something admirable, did precisely one thing.

It cost two point eight million dollars and changed nothing.