It is not grief, and it is not fear, exactly.

It is disorientation — the deep, animal confusion of a creature discovering that a law of nature it had relied upon its whole life has quietly stopped applying to it.

For as long as Flynn had been an adult, the world had worked one way: he wanted, he paid or he pressured or he signed, and the wanting was satisfied.

That was not a strategy to him; it was simply how reality behaved, as fixed as gravity.

And now he stood in a doorway and reality was not behaving that way, and I could see him reaching, again and again, for the levers that had always worked — the money, the lawyers, the sheer force of his certainty — and finding every one of them disconnected from the machine.