This was the particular grinding exhaustion of a person who is afraid, who lies awake, who has gotten himself into something he does not know how to get out of.

I knew that exhaustion.

I had seen it hollow out people I’d interviewed in the course of investigations, good people who had made one bad choice and then spent every waking hour since trying to live inside the consequences.

It ages a person from the inside.

It had aged my brother, and I had mistaken it for the ordinary tiredness of a man with a new job, because I had wanted to.

Down at the waterline, Julian clapped Jim on the shoulder and gave him a firm, commanding nod — the same nod I had watched him give junior associates at his firm’s holiday parties, the one that said produce the result, no excuses.