The law of unintended consequences: in five years our debt would be all we had in common and the only thing that kept us together.

MY BEIGE SUIT, sponged and pressed last night, hung from the clothesline that stretched across the room. I stepped carefully over David’s prolapsed legs to reach it. I’d worn it with a black shirt for my first interview at CDMI, so today I’d wear it with a white shirt and hope nobody would notice it was the same suit. Once I had a closet full of designer clothes, but I’d sold them all, on eBay and in consignment shops, piece by piece, like an impoverished royal selling off her jewels. And realized almost nothing for them. It turned out designer clothes were like new cars. They lost half their value the minute you wore them off the lot.

I turned off the oven and pulled the blanket from the bed and spread it over David and tucked it up to his chin. I wished he’d wake up and say it again. Don’t be nervous. You’re a star. This was the first callback I’d had for a real lawyer job in over a year. I was fighting not to let myself hope, to steel myself against the pain of another disappointment. But hope sneaked in anyway, and the more I hoped, the more nervous I became.

“Say it,” I whispered, but he slept on.

WE MET AT a merger. Two midsize law firms aimed to increase both their prestige and their average profit-per-partner numbers by pooling their personnel. I was on the litigation due-diligence team for Firm A; David was on the financial due-diligence team for Firm B. The closing was attended by more than thirty lawyers and accountants and investment bankers, and the conference room buzzed with a dozen separate conversations, live and through headsets.

David was busy running numbers on his laptop, and I was occupied with the closing document inventory. Still, I noticed him across the crowded room. I noticed the mop of golden hair, the square jaw, the nice bulge of biceps inside his shirtsleeves. I didn’t usually go for pretty boys—You be the pretty one, Mrs. Casco always told me; find somebody smart instead. But I could tell he was smart, too, by the way the other men on his team listened when he spoke, the way they nodded when he corrected them.

But what I noticed most was that he was noticing me. It was more than noticing. He recognized me, and I, him. We could each see the glow of ambition that burned like a signal fire in the other. We could see in each other a clear front-runner in the meritocracy race. No legacy admissions for us, no family connections, no quota assistance. We came from nothing but were certain one day to have everything. We were self-made in the self-making. Golden boy, meet golden girl.

The merger closing was followed by a celebratory dinner, and the same thirty people exchanged the conference table for a long banquet table at an uptown steakhouse. We sat in the same scrimmage lines we’d occupied during the day, but after the starter course, David pulled off a sleight-of-hand shuffle that landed him into the seat next to me. As a dozen increasingly drunken and raucous conversations roared around us, we bent our heads low and spoke only to each other while our neglected rib eyes oozed red blood over our plates.