The name, when it finally came to me, was shame, though it took me weeks to let myself use the word.

Men in my world do not deal in shame; we deal in strength and weakness, advantage and exposure, and shame is filed under weakness and buried accordingly.

But what I had felt at that door was shame, pure and specific — the shame of a man who has just seen, performed by a stranger, the thing he himself owed and had failed for eight months to pay.

So the next morning I summoned Juliet to my office.