He kept his job; the affair was a private disgrace, not a public one, and I had no interest in making it more.

But the settlement took most of what he had counted on keeping, and the Seaport condo — the one he had put our money down on for a future with Dagny — fell through when the deal collapsed and the earnest money was gone, absorbed into the divorce as the dissipated marital asset it always was.

He did not get the condo, or the girlfriend, or the clean new life he had narrated to her for six months.

He got a small apartment, a support order, every other weekend with a daughter who is polite to him and reserved, and the particular loneliness of a man who traded a real family for an imagined one and lost both.

I take no pleasure in reciting it.

But I will not pretend it is unjust.