J. Ingram Barrett, Jr., was the senior VP and general counsel of CDMI. I never expected to get a meeting with him. The hope rose like gorge in my throat, so thick I was afraid I might vomit. I smiled broadly. “Not at all.”

I was like a stage actor, performing the same role in interview after interview, always a new audience but the lines were the same, and I could deliver them on cue and with opening-night enthusiasm. Actors might be jittery with nerves backstage, but when the curtain went up and the lights came on, they revved themselves up and dazzled the audience night after goddamn night. That was me in a job interview.

The woman escorted me to a conference room, apologized again for the delay, and closed the door behind her as she left. I sank into a chair and let my smile collapse. Ingram Barrett. I was meeting with Ingram Barrett. I mustn’t blow this. I had to input everything I knew about him and calculate the optimal approach. I had to be smart.

I wasn’t smart before, and neither was David. He was in finance, I was in law, so between us, we knew all the ins and outs of indebtedness. We should have been smart enough to figure the best way out of our troubles, or at least smart enough not to compound the damage with bad decisions. We should have been a check on each other’s worst impulses. Instead we were each other’s enabler and rationalizer.

That fall we’d booked a winter vacation in Bali, and after the ax fell, we convinced ourselves to go ahead with it anyway. We’ll lose our deposit if we cancel, I said. We need to keep our spirits up, David said. Job hunting required self-confidence, and self-confidence required lots of self-care. That was the way we rationalized keeping our gym memberships and my monthly appointments at the hair salon. We dined out often, lunch, drinks, and dinner, because networking was critical, and again, spirits.

Our credit card debt snowballed. The co-op fees went unpaid, and so did our mortgage and student loans, and when we finally faced the fact that our debts were insurmountable, we convinced ourselves that the best course wasn’t to contact our creditors and negotiate forbearance plans but, instead, to walk away from all of it. We moved out of the apartment in the dead of night and left no forwarding address.

The banks found us anyway, and they seemed to take our flight personally: they didn’t merely foreclose and call it a day, as banks everywhere were doing with other borrowers. No, our banks pursued us personally for the deficiency and obtained judgments that would hang over our heads for decades.

My hands were trembling again. I clasped them together and took a deep breath and rose to my feet to survey the conference room. The wall of windows showed the same gray fog I’d viewed from the reception area. The other three walls were hung with enormous TV screens. Most of them were playing videos of runway shows from the latest collections of the company’s major labels, but on the center screen, a digital slideshow of Claudine de Martineau was playing.