It had bought the fear of my rivals, which I had mistaken for respect, and the flattery of my inferiors, which I had mistaken for love.

And above all it had bought me the ability to never sit still long enough to notice any of this, because a man closing three deals before breakfast has no idle hour in which the emptiness can catch him.

That was money’s cruelest trick, the one I understood only much later: it did not fill the void, it funded an endless distraction from it.

Every acquisition was a way of not thinking about the sonogram.