With a trenchant exhalation, I extinguished the lone candle on a carrot cake marking the first 100 days of my sobriety. By its recipe, Chef had transported us to the front steps of Bourke Street Bakery. Yet we floated in the Tyrrhenian Sea, off Elba, upon a vessel of implausible splendour. In my line of sight was the yellow house upon the Portoferraio promontory where Napoleon endured his first exile.

“You've done well, son,” Stavros conceded with a wave, and something like a grimace. "You'd get less for murder." So went August 5.