This was the thing about her life in those years: some nights it was beautiful but some nights there was such pain, throbbing just under the surface of the evening for no discernible reason, and on nights like that she understood why Lucas and Renata did what they did, the dulling trick with the needle.

In the kingdom of money it was important to be thin, but she would have run anyway.

There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.

She didn’t tell him that her mother had died two weeks earlier, or that her brother had been lurking around and saw her do it, or that she had a brother. It is possible to leave so much out of any given story.

It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she’d already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet.

Luxury is a weakness.

Not twenty men, twenty coworkers, twenty colleagues who’ve been stuck at sea together for months and are fairly sick of one another’s company, and not a single solitary beer for lubrication, because of the no-alcohol rule.

trapped in a meeting that had outlived its natural lifespan but refused to die.

“This is slightly embarrassing,” Alkaitis said that night, when they’d left the bar and retired to a quieter corner of the lobby to discuss investments, “but you said you’re in shipping, and I realized as you said it that I’ve only the dimmest idea of what that actually means.” Leon smiled. “You’re not alone in that. It’s a largely invisible indust