JULIAN 

I had been built on these things. I had been built on them in the specific and literal way of a man whose interior structure had been constructed from the materials his father gave him, who had taken those materials at nineteen and had built from them the particular and specific Julian Blackwood of the professional world, efficient, controlled, emotionally contained, exactly and precisely effective.

Thomas had built me.

And Thomas was watching me fail to be what he had built.

Thomas had been watching since September.

And now Thomas had sent a photograph.

I thought about why the photograph.

I thought about it with the specific and strategic...