To me it all sounded muffled, as though I were hearing it from underwater, because my body was anchored to the velvet seat but my mind had been dragged backward across a decade, to an autumn afternoon that had set the shape of the rest of my life.

The Queens apartment always smelled of old rain.

The damp came through the brick and mixed with the sharp herbal tea Coraline drank to settle her stomach.

I was twenty-nine and drowning in the wreckage of my first venture — the capital gone, the friends who had toasted my inevitable success suddenly unreachable.

I was cornered and humiliated and suffocating.

I have to tell the truth about those days, even the part that shames me most, which is that I was not a good man even before I made my great betrayal.

The poverty had made me bitter, and the bitterness had made me cruel in small ways I did not notice at the time.