They took my silence for not understanding.

It was the opposite.

It was the specific stillness of a person who has just heard, at a dinner party, the name of a debt she is in the middle of buying.

I remember that dinner precisely.

Winston had been complaining, in the expansive way of a man who assumes everyone at the table finds his problems fascinating, about a lender who was “getting difficult” over “some technicality,” and he had named the entity — Tidewater — with the airy contempt of a man who has never once in his life imagined the technicality winning.

And I had sat very still with my wine, because I knew that particular technicality intimately; my analysts had flagged it three weeks earlier as the exact structural flaw that made the whole position worth acquiring.