If he had ever bothered to actually know me, he might have loved me well enough that his mother’s cruelty would have been unthinkable to tolerate.

Instead he had known only the surface, and defended only the surface, and the surface was leaving on a police boat with the deed to his apartment.

There is a justice in that so exact that no court could have designed it.

He had reduced me to a thing that existed for his comfort, and it turned out the thing owned the building.

Behind him, Winston sank into a white lounge chair and stared at the burnt cigar hole in the deck he no longer owned.

Theodora was weeping — not like a matriarch of anything now, but like a woman who had built her whole house on sand and was only just feeling the tide reach her ankles.

Chapter 17 — The Ledger

I stepped down the short boarding ladder onto the waiting deck of the police launch, and the rubber hull bumped gently against the towering white side of the yacht.