It was not a cruel smile.

It was simply the smile of a person watching someone reach, with total confidence, for a railing that is no longer there.

I had seen the gesture before, in depositions, in boardrooms — the instinctive reach of a person who has fallen and expects the familiar handhold to be where it has always been.

Damian had spent his whole career with that railing under his hand: the contract, the leverage, the certainty that the institution would protect its own.

He reached for it now out of pure reflex, and his hand closed on air, and I watched the understanding arrive on his face a full second after his fingers already knew.