The people who design those baroque punishments imagine they are the opposite of their victims, and they are actually the truest prisoners of them.

I did not want to spend my one life as Marius’s warden.

A warden, after all, is also locked in.

So I let the courts do the plain, sufficient work of consequence, and I spent my attention — which is the only truly finite thing any of us has — on the things I was building instead of the man I was leaving behind.

That, and not the debt, and not the bankruptcy, and not the sixty-foot image of my face on the atrium wall, was the actual victory.

The rest was just paperwork.