Not worth the association.

Not worth one more minute of loyalty.

Everything he had called love turned out to have been contingent — a feeling he was happy to have as long as it was free, and was prepared to drop the instant it came with a bill.

And Valentina, watching the same thing I was watching, understood it a beat later than I did, which was its own small tragedy: she had blown up a twelve-year friendship and her whole social world for a man who was, at that very moment, in real time, deciding she was a liability to be shed.

She had bet everything on his love, and she was about to learn, in a conference room, in front of me, that there had been nothing to bet on.

I almost felt something for her then.