He walked out of the courthouse a free man and a destitute one — accounts seized, penthouse foreclosed, the whole glittering apparatus of the self-made king repossessed piece by piece, down to the suits.

There was a particular symmetry to the way it ended that I have never stopped appreciating.

The instrument Marius had built to erase me — a document declaring, in the sworn hand of a bought psychiatrist, that I was not competent to control my own affairs — was the exact instrument that erased him.

He had commissioned a lie about my mind, and the lie, once it existed on paper with a forged professional signature at the bottom, became a crime that no amount of charm could talk its way out of.

I did not have to prove I was sane; the mere existence of a document falsely claiming otherwise, purchased and forged, was the felony.

He had reached for a weapon that could only be used by first manufacturing a crime, and then he had handed me the crime by leaving the folder in a safe he was too vain to believe I could open.