But there is a rough justice in the world’s ordinary machinery, and it delivered the lesson more precisely than I ever could have staged it.

For five years Craig had built his entire sense of himself on a performance funded by me — the big man, the generous host, the one who waved off prices.

He had never once earned the role he played; he had only borrowed the money that let him play it, from a wife he then went home and belittled.

And so it was fitting, in a way no revenge I designed could have improved on, that the performance ended not with a confrontation but with a declined card and a table of silent friends — that the man collapsed the instant the borrowed money stopped, revealing to everyone, including at last himself, that there had never been anything holding him up but me.

Chapter 9 — The Oven

By seven the next morning it was already near ninety and climbing.