I think about that often now, in the quieter life I have built since.

For a long time I had unconsciously assumed, the way people with money quietly assume, that value flowed from wealth, that the person with more was somehow the more substantial person, the one whose word carried more weight.

Vanessa had every advantage that assumption confers, the polish and the confidence and the expensive certainty, and underneath it she was hollow.

Teresa had none of it, and she turned out to be the most substantial person in the entire story, the one whose word, when finally weighed, was worth everything.

I had nearly thrown away the honest woman to keep the glittering one.

That I did not is the single thing from that whole terrible season I am grateful for, and it is not a thing I get to be proud of, only relieved.

I came very close to choosing wrong.

The margin was a rescheduled flight and a machine with no opinion.

I do not intend to leave such things to margins ever again.