The people whose loyalty I had purchased and cultivated and counted on, the lawyer I paid handsomely, the politician whose career I financed, the doctor I had endowed with ten million dollars, every single one of them had betrayed me the instant it profited them, because loyalty that is bought is only ever rented, and it goes to the highest bidder the moment the lease is up.

But there was another economy running alongside the one I understood, invisible to me, keeping its own books, and it was in that economy that my life was saved.

Years earlier, my foundation had cleared the medical debt of a stranger I never met, and I had not thought of it as an investment, or a debt owed to me, or leverage of any kind.

I had thought of it, insofar as I thought of it at all, as nothing, a rounding error, a small automatic good deed absorbed into a budget.