Dumont had smiled a vicious smile as he finalized the purchase. He had a sense that she enjoyed taking some of—a lot of—his money, and he knew that behind that smile was something that hated him. And he couldn’t blame her, not after—

She had left with one last comment, almost too brief to be noticed, like a warning she didn’t really want to give: “Don’t fuck this up.” He thought that she had been talking about more than real estate; he wondered if it was, maybe, her version of giving her blessing. Like a threat that had kindness underneath.

He looked over the apartment, this shining and echoing space, and he felt those words in him, around him. Don’t fuck up, Jack. Not again.

Jack felt like he was starting over. He felt like he had no idea what he was doing.

He had never let himself notice, digging himself out from under his childhood, how little forward progress he had really made. He stayed in Bolton Hill, with his childhood best friend, with the family that had adopted him in everything but name, and he worked at—now owned—the same company as he had right out of school, that one meeting with Franklin when he was fourteen controlling every year to come. He was bored at work, exhausted by his influential clients and their finances, but blessed by it, going in every day, still trying to prove something. He was grateful for so many of those things—could never negate how necessary and important all of those people and places were to him—but he had never...

He had never changed. He had never lived up to the person inside of him whom no one else had seen.

No one but Theo. Theo had known everything about him.

How could he manage to feel so successful on the outside and like he had wasted his whole life on the inside?

Jack walked over to the windows. The sun was just beginning to set, darkness creeping in earlier, now, and the red light of the Domino Sugar sign was glowing out over the water. He saw the angles and glass of the National Aquarium across the harbor, the smokestacks of the old Pratt Street Power Plant, new builds, old bones. All of it was a part of his story; up here in the penthouse apartment he could see the evidence of a life he had lived, this life in Baltimore, moving neither forward nor backward. A quiet life of big things. A life of monuments and monumental actions—marriage and children and financial success and a lie he had kept on telling. The lie that kept him frozen.