Five minutes after my divorce was final, my father gripped my arm outside the courthouse and said, “Block every card, right now.” That night my ex tried to spend $300,000 on his mistress’s sapphire necklace with my company’s black card — in a club my firm owned.

“How do you know?”

“Forty of them across the table,” my father said. “And forty wives in the gallery. I watched every one of them stop thinking about it, eventually, the ones who made it. You can see it. The day the number stops being about him and starts just being a number.” He tapped the statement. “This one. Line fourteen. What is it?”

“A deposit. Real one. The Kensington project.”

“Does it make you think about Trevor?”

“No. It makes me think I undercharged for the Kensington project.”

My father smiled.

“There she is,” he said. “That’s the daughter I locked the cards for.”

We finished the statements.

It was a good quarter.

It’s been a good year.