The recording did something to the room that the photographs could not.

Photographs of an affair prove a betrayal of the heart, and a clever man can spin even those — a moment of weakness, a marriage in trouble, a story with two sides.

But there is no spinning a man’s own voice explaining, plainly, that his marriage was never real, that he had married for the shares and stayed for the shares and regarded his wife as an instrument of corporate control.

It was the difference between catching someone in a sin and catching them in a strategy.

The affair could be called human.

This could only be called what it was: a confession that the whole marriage had been a maneuver, delivered in the flat, businesslike tone Dorian used when he thought he was talking only to people who shared his view of the world.