I had, without knowing it, been repaid for a kindness I did not even remember giving.

I have thought about that a great deal since, about the strange economy of kindness, and about how completely it operates outside the ledgers I had spent my life keeping.

I had built an empire by understanding leverage, debts, obligations, the careful accounting of who owed whom and what.

I knew, at any moment, the exact state of my financial and political balance sheets, who I could call on and what it would cost.

And it turned out that none of that accounting had saved me.