It was a strange, vertiginous moment, sitting in a man’s dining room hearing him wave away the precise financial fact that was, at that very hour, moving toward him like weather he refused to look at.

I could have said something.

A kinder woman might have — might have found some gentle way to warn him, out of decency, that the technicality was real and closing.

But he had just, thirty seconds earlier, called my career “a little hobby,” and Theodora had laughed, and Callum had studied his plate, and so I said nothing at all.

I sipped my wine, and I let the man dig, and I filed the evening with all the others.

It is remarkable what people will tell you about their own ruin when they are certain you are too small to matter.