That blindness was not incidental to who he was; it was the engine of everything.

A man who could look at the raising of his own son and see something beneath him was a man who could use that son as a shield without flinching, because he had never really seen the boy as a person in the first place — only as an asset, a future, a thing that reflected on him.

His contempt for the small work of love was the exact same faculty that let him commit the enormous crime.

I did not understand all of that standing by the elevators.

But I felt the cold of it, and some part of me filed it away, and later, when I needed to believe that walking away from this man was not a failure but a rescue, that cold was the thing I reached for.

Chapter 4 — The Basement