Chapter 1: The Cheap Joke of an Empty Man
The dining room of our upscale, leased downtown apartment—a place Ethan insisted we live in despite the exorbitant rent—was thick with the suffocating tension of another failed month.
Ethan tossed his heavy linen napkin onto the glass dining table with a dramatic, frustrated sigh. For the past hour, I had sat quietly, pushing a piece of grilled salmon around my plate, listening to him deliver a relentless, exhausting monologue about the slumping commercial real estate market. According to Ethan, the market was rigged, his clients were idiots, and his managing broker was a dinosaur who didn’t understand his “vision.” It was never his fault.
He leaned back in his chair, adjusting the cuffs of his bespoke Italian suit. Ethan was a man who worshipped the aesthetic of wealth. He drove a leased Porsche he could barely afford the insurance on, carried his diminishing stack of credit cards in a handcrafted leather billfold, and treated waiters with the condescending impatience of a billionaire. He believed that if he simply looked rich enough, the universe would eventually deposit the requisite funds into his account.
