They had watched a woman be humiliated and nearly thrown from a boat and they had kept their faces smooth and their glasses full, because to object would have cost them a friendship they valued more than a stranger’s dignity.

And now the same instinct that had kept them silent for Theodora was carrying them briskly toward the exit, away from her, because the friendship that had been worth my dignity was not worth a foreclosure.

That is what that kind of loyalty is.

It is not a bond; it is a bet, placed on whoever looks likeliest to keep winning, and it is called in the instant the odds turn.

The Whitcombes had spent a lifetime buying that loyalty with dinners and yacht parties and the reflected warmth of their money, and they were watching, now, exactly how much of it they had actually purchased.

None of it.