Prologue

It was a cloudless and sunny mid-summer San Francisco morning as I watched the waking city from the port side bridge rail as the giant container ship sailed out of the Port of Oakland and made its way under the Oakland Bay Bridge. At slightly after 6 A.M. it seemed like the sun washed city was holding its breath waiting for the great infusion of life that it's waking population and the populations from its neighboring cities would bring to it. I watched the sun reflect from the buildings — the YMCA along the waterfront where I had spent so many hours working to keep myself fit, the ferry building at the Embarcadero, the gleaming office tower where I had worked the past 15 years, and the office tower where my faithless wife worked. I saw it all as I left it, sailing for Asia, maybe to never return. It was my fiftieth birthday and my guts were in a knot and I wondered how my idyllic life had simply gone to shit in the last three weeks. I had gone from being happily married and closing the biggest and most lucrative merger deal of my law firm's history to being alone and out of work. Both were my choices but the events that precipitated those choices were not of my choosing. I smiled ruefully thinking of the irony of my choice of escape from the horrific situation I had discovered. In two days my wife and I were to sail on a luxury cruise that would begin a six-month adventure that was to reaffirm our love for each other after 25 years of marriage. Instead I was sailing alone, far from the lap of luxury, gutted by the knowledge that somewhere along the way our marriage had become a sham and that my wife didn't love me anymore. It was my fiftieth birthday. Happy Birthday to me.