Because I knew things about the Whitcombes that the Whitcombes had worked very hard not to know about themselves.

I knew that the summer house in Southampton was mortgaged past its value.

I knew that the yacht we were standing on was leased through a balloon structure that a first-year analyst could have told them was a trap.

I knew that Winston Whitcombe had spent forty years living on borrowed money and calling it wealth, and that the borrowing had finally, quietly, come due.

I knew all of it the way I know the weather — as a professional fact, without heat.

What I did not yet know, on the morning of the yacht party, was how they treated a person they believed had nothing.