A person capable of real feeling would have at least had to talk himself into what Arthur was doing.

Arthur did not have to talk himself into anything.

He had never left the comfortable certainty that everything, including love, including his own mother, was a transaction to be managed at the lowest available cost.

Chapter 3 — I Should Have Said No

I should have said no.

I have replayed that moment in the office more times than I can count, and in every honest version of it, I know that the right answer, the clean answer, the answer a better man would have given, was no.

Because what he was asking me to do was a kind of lie that turned my stomach even as I sat there.