The truth was their many differences had made Klay love Hungry even more. And he was pretty certain the same had been true for her. When Hungry discovered the walls he had built inside of himself, walls Erin, despite valiant efforts, had been unable to break down, Hungry had not given up. She had picked up a hammer and chiseled away at those barriers, working patiently. And she had been successful in ways no woman ever had.

He told her about the Jakarta car accident—all of it—and how it made him feel. He told her about his childhood, his parents, and the loss that had laced his adulthood with despair. He told her about his fear that no matter how hard he tried, the world would simply absorb his efforts and get worse. He told her he wasn’t a good person; he was a bad person who did good things to hide the truth. He was afraid, deep down, that he liked to hurt people. Feelings he didn’t know he had. Fears he had never shared.

But then, on the verge of what felt like true intimacy, he would pick up his duffel bag and leave. Erin thought he was repeating his same sins. She encouraged him to try again. “This woman is good for you, Tom,” she said. “Go back.”

Hungry was good for him. She knew how to love and be loved. She was willing to go more than halfway in their relationship. She understood him, and loved him anyway. “Don’t you see?” Hungry said to him. “You never take a case you won’t win. I am that case, Thomas. Your unwinnable case. You have to commit to love, and risk losing it, to find happiness.”

Commitment wasn’t the issue—he wanted a relationship with Hungry—but he had made another commitment years ago, and that commitment left no space for her. And so he would disappear again, and months would pass before his heart drove him back to South Africa. And when he returned their cycle would begin again: she chiseling away, he pretending he was an honest man struggling to make a happy life together.

But he was not an honest man.

•   •   •

The DC lunch crowd was heading back to their offices when Klay stepped out of his taxi in front of The Sovereign’s headquarters. Klay looked up at the wedge-shaped brick building and felt a twinge of pride. The Sovereign was about to celebrate its 150th anniversary. In a world of media bankruptcies, buyouts, mergers, and takeovers, The Sovereign had endured, protected against time by a gift from a railroad baron named Hiram Prendergast, and his cousin, a botany-loving inventor named Thomas Edison, who together had endowed the nonprofit institution in perpetuity. For the next 141 years, including the moment Klay stepped onto the sidewalk, a Prendergast had controlled The Sovereign.