Lance liked everyone. He’d even liked Lucia, more or less, though she was never warm to him and she constantly complained about his hair getting in her sweaters. She’d had a point. We had a maid five days a week, yet his stiff fur always wound up in her knitwear. She gave up on wearing anything black more than once. I thought it had been Lance’s way of chasing her out.

I gave him a pat on the head and tossed him a treat. He caught it, but he wasn’t jumping as high as he used to or landing as confidently. He crunched it slowly, as if his teeth hurt.

I didn’t think about him getting old. I thought he’d be with me forever.

He finished the treat and slapped his tail on the kitchen tile.

Fuck it. I gave him another treat and put the box away. When I lifted my arm to reach the cabinet, I caught sight of a dog hair in my sweater. And another.

“I’m going to change.”

He followed me to the bedroom.

Lucia had bought me a pet hair remover brush as a divorce present. I should have been heartbroken to even look at it, but when we split up, I wasn’t hurt. I was relieved.

I never had to see Lucia again. I never had to hear her brittle, derisive laugh or be nice to her friends. I never had to pretend I was the one throwing her birthday extravaganza. I didn’t have to go to another Montano Foundation event where she worked tirelessly to help children she’d never know to make up for the children she couldn’t have.

In the end, it was all about money. Even if she’d ever loved me, by the end, all the love had turned into money.

So fuck me for not seeing it.

Fuck me for letting her push me into a marriage I didn’t want.

Fuck me for being weak.

Lance and I wrestled around for a few minutes, but he was old and tired. He couldn’t play too rough or for too long. In the end, I rolled onto my back, arms and legs spread, looking at the white ceiling.

I didn’t trust people easily. Why had I fallen for her eight years ago? I had been a kid from nowhere, a little prick hotshot throwing money around in restaurants. She’d been an Italian model for fifteen minutes. She’d started a charity with millions collected from men she denied were ex-lovers. On paper, she seemed better than I could do.

Fuck the paper. Never again. She should have been no more than an aspirational fuck.

Whatever. There was no need to worry about it. I was free. I could go anywhere. I could do anything.

I took Lance by the ears and looked into his brown eyes. “You’re the only one for me, ya hear?”

He licked my chin and gave me his special whine that translated to, “Go for walk.”

“Okay, boy.”

He leapt for the door. By the time I got there, his tail was smacking the molding and he had his leash in his teeth. I was just about to grab it when my phone rang.

“Give me a second.” I checked the caller ID and answered. “Brian.”

“Did you see Neville’s London report? If we make the arbitrage window, there’s a thirty percent return.”

“Thirty?” Holy crap. That was insane.

“Guaranteed. We need to move on this now.”

“And big.” I’d paced back to my home office with a mind fully occupied with calculating closing times and exchange rates. We had eleven minutes.

Brian and I spoke our shorthand, moving money, calculating odds, agreeing to go big on a hunch I’d had the day before and handed to Neville for calculations. We hung up at nine minutes and I pumped the fist that held the phone with a “yes!”

A nice afternoon’s work.

I came back to the front of the house whistling fucking Dixie.

Lance was whimpering, his chin on his front paws. The fur was dark and damp at the ends, and a puddle of piss spread over the floor, flowing in rivulets toward the forty-thousand-dollar Persian rug.

“Crap!”

Lance whined and gave me his guilty face, but I didn’t have time. I snapped paper towels off the roll and saved the rug.

“It’s all right,” I said to Lance on my hands and knees. “It’s my fault, but I just made a ton of money.”

Lucia’s voice in my mind cut through my satisfaction. “Porque? Christopher, what are you going to do with all this money?”

That question had come toward the end, and it baffled me. She’d loved spending my money. I’d thought she loved me, but in moments when I was honest with myself, I thought it was all about the money for her.

I squirted disinfectant on the floor and rolled off more paper towels, recalling the night I met her.

I was sure she was about the money, and I was stupid and all right with that. I liked it, because she’d have me for what I’d done, not who I was.

She’d been looking over my shoulder at Lola’s. Bernie had been talking about my quant fund and she was cooing about how she didn’t understand it. I’d tried to hide my phone screen because… why?

Right. I’d been looking at my checking account. Why? To prove some shit to Bernie?

Why would I call up my checking account on my phone? At dinner, no less. The most interesting transactions weren’t in the checking. That was a slush fund for bills and crap.

Lucia had long nails. She’d run them along the back of my hand as I’d slid my fingers over the glass.

“You have a dog?” she asked, pulling a hair off my sleeve.

“Yeah.”

“Little or big?”

She was making conversation, which you were supposed to do at a big dinner. I was agitated the night I’d met Lucia. I knew why for a while, then I forgot. Something in the checking account had been bugging me.

“Medium.”

I’d been counting days.

Why? I wasn’t late with anything. I had a team of people to pay the damn bills. What was it with the checking account eight years ago? And why had it mattered?

Tossing the last of the soiled paper towels, I leaned down to face my dog. “Do you still want to go out? Walk?”

Of course he did. We went around the corner. He gave what he had left to a few hydrants and I tried to pull apart that night with Lucia.

My personal checking account. Why why why?

When we got back, I poured Lance some water, but instead of drinking, he followed me to my office. It was hardwood and chrome, shine and windows. My weekend hideaway from the social dramas of the fashion world that Lucia brought home. Throwing open the closet doors, I rooted past the bank boxes and corporate binders on the top shelf, finding my old checkbooks.

Counting backward, I found the checks I would have written when I met Lucia. No, no, no. Lance plopped down in front of me and whined, tilting his head toward my desk. I didn’t know if it was because of the pain in his spine or if he was trying to mention that looking at my bank account online would be easier.

“I think I’ll remember better if I feel the paper, you know?” I told him.

He put his chin between his paws and watched me with his big brown eyes, as if he knew what I was about to find out.

“Something you want to tell me, boy?”

He just blinked.

“Fine.” I flipped through the book.

Like most people, I used mostly online payments and bank transfers, so a carbon for a check dated six months before I met Lucia wasn’t too hard to find.

Seven hundred forty-nine dollars, made out to Catherine Barrington.

My phone number was in the memo.

Yeah.

That was why I’d been looking at my checking account.

Check 3201 had never been cashed, and the night I’d met Lucia was exactly six months after it was dated. The last day it was valid.

That was the night I gave up on Catherine.