Julian was not sorry that he had treated a struggling waitress with casual cruelty.

He was sorry that the struggling waitress had turned out to have money and a powerful family behind her.

His apology was not moral; it was strategic, a recalculation, the same instinct that had made him roll the loss onto me the night before now making him grovel, because the math had changed.

If I had simply been what he thought I was, a poor girl with no connections, he would have felt nothing, and would have done the same thing to me a hundred more times without a flicker of conscience.

What he was responding to was not my humanity, which had been there all along and had meant nothing to him.