A year earlier, those same employees would have parted for him out of deference, or fear, or the ordinary instinct to make way for a powerful man.

They parted for him now for a different reason, and he must have felt the difference, even in his state, because deference and judgment feel nothing alike when you are the one walking through them with your badge already surrendered and officers at your elbows.

That was the part that stayed with me.

Not his face, not his voice still insisting on a misunderstanding as the doors swung shut, but the silence of the people who stepped out of his path.

For eighteen months they had been afraid — of him, of the debt, of the quiet draft of fear moving through the building.