Damian had run that equation for twenty-six years.

He had told himself the whole time that he was building all of it for a life he would live later, with people he would love later, in a peace he would claim later — and later had quietly eaten his entire life, and the people the empire was theoretically for had never been in it at all, because he had always been off acquiring more of the thing that was supposed to eventually let him be with them.

Sitting on that porch, he saw the trick of it.

The purple crayon inside the lines was not a reward he had earned by acquiring enough.

It was the thing itself, the actual point, available the entire time, requiring not one dollar of the fortune he had spent his life chasing — requiring only his presence, the single resource he had spent twenty-six years refusing to spend.

He had had it backward.