Paul was reluctant to leave Miami for the quiet of Fort Myers.

True, Miami wasn’t his type of city, far too glitzy and vain. “Sure thing, let me just run up to the room and grab my abs,” he’d said when his colleague Evan suggested skipping the Seventeenth Annual Florida Real Estate Conference’s pre-keynote networking break for a trip to South Beach. But the conference had been enjoyable in its way, including a rooftop party with cigars and cognac, swapping stories about failed licensing exams and narrow closings, and even a short swim at midnight with a surprisingly free-spirited former plaintiff’s lawyer who’d gone into realty for fun. Though Paul had a habit of using his dry wit simply to put himself above the other realtors, in this instance he’d demurred at Evan’s offer because he knew how important networking was to one’s success as an agent.

Real estate was indeed a “who you know, not what you know” kind of business. His mother had counseled him similarly regarding the arts when he would confess to her that he was tired of waiting tables while constantly auditioning, rehearsing, and performing. She would say this as though the gap between struggle and hard-won recognition would be closed by an encounter with just one person, yet to be unveiled; perhaps this had been true and, in the end, he had never met that person. Nonetheless, at fifty-one, Paul had exchanged his bohemian life in other parts of the country for a spot at Wesson & Sons Global Realty Group, a highly selective agency that, though called global, had branches only in central and southwestern Florida, to which he now returned.

“The conference was all right,” he said to Priscilla, his girlfriend, when he got into her car outside his office building, where the charter bus had dropped everyone off. “If you stick too many realtors in a room, you can cut the ego with a knife.” It was important for Priscilla to have a picture of him as someone who was refined, above the scrum. Sharing the fact that he’d liked the time, that he’d left in a state of mild inspiration stemming especially from one memorable session about daring oneself to broaden one’s horizons and aim for a wider geographical array of listings, would have obstructed that basic aim.

“Everyone knows a township is thirty-six whole square miles,” he recalled the coach saying, “but the powers that be want us to forget that when we’re farming leads. They want us to stick to a few square miles at most. But being an agent has never been about obeying the status quo.”

There was some truth to what the coach told them, he thought, as Priscilla drifted to the right to avoid a piece of metal that had presumably fallen from a moving vehicle. His team lead, Brendan, had advised him to stay in one neighborhood at first. Who was he to restrain Paul?

Now, eyes fixed on the road, Priscilla handed him a rectangular baby-blue box tied with a satin ribbon. “Here, I got these for you.” His girlfriend⁠—⁠married once before, with a daughter starting her second semester of college⁠—⁠had brought him chocolates.

An aspect of himself that bothered Paul was his appetite for sugar. How he loved to prepare the two of them a sophisticated dinner of  handmade ravioli and two filets of fresh grouper, accompanied by a bottle of Chardonnay and an innocent cigarette! Why did she have to embarrass him by indulging his desire for chocolates? But he devoured them as she drove.