“Some people genuinely need a hand up,” I said, stirring cream into a cup someone else had poured for me.

“But plenty of others just prefer to live that way.” I said it lightly, the way you say a thing you have never once examined, a thing that has simply always been in your mouth.

I said it in a climate-controlled kitchen, with a cook at the stove and a driver idling in the courtyard, wearing a robe that cost more than some people make in a month.

I had never gone hungry.

I had never been cold in a way I couldn’t fix by turning a dial.

I had never, in my entire comfortable life, wondered what I would do if the floor of the world dropped out from under me — because I could not imagine that it ever could.

That was the woman who set down her coffee and went to lunch with her friends that afternoon: comfortable, certain, and understanding absolutely nothing.

I want you to see her clearly, because in a few hours she was going to meet someone who would take her apart.

The thing about the belief I held that morning — that some people simply prefer to live on the streets — is that it was not really a belief at all.

A belief is something you have arrived at, examined, tested against the world.

What I had was more comfortable than that, and more dangerous: an assumption I had never once looked at directly, that had been handed to me so early and so smoothly that I mistook it for common sense.

And it served me, the way such assumptions always serve the comfortable.

It let me look at a person sleeping on a grate and feel nothing but a mild distaste, because if they preferred it, then their suffering was a choice, and a choice is not my responsibility, and so I could keep my money and my warm house and my clear conscience all at once.

That is the quiet genius of the lie.