Patrick would never know how many remarkable people he had dismissed over the years, how many kind and capable and important human beings he had waved toward the budget inns down the road, because those people, unlike Clara, simply left, and never revealed what he had failed to see.

He got away with the mistake, over and over, precisely because the people he misjudged had no way to correct him, and so he never learned that his glance-and-judge was a broken instrument, and he went on using it, confident, until the one night it caught a woman who could hand him the bill for a career’s worth of the same error.

The surface tells you almost nothing true about a person.

It tells you a great deal about the person who mistakes it for the truth.