What that means, in the only sentence that matters to this account: he is responsible for the operating performance of a portfolio of about fourteen commercial properties in central Texas — retail centres, two office buildings, and a country club with event facilities that his firm’s parent acquired in a portfolio deal in the August of 2024.

He earns a hundred and five thousand dollars a year.

He rents.

He has a bicycle in the hallway and a girlfriend called Priti who is a paediatric nurse and who took eleven months to meet me because Julian is careful.

He does not own a country club.

He has never owned a country club.

Nobody he is related to has ever owned a country club, and his firm does not hold anybody’s mortgage, and the whole of what happened in that ballroom in October came out of a sentence he said that was about eleven per cent true and that he had been rehearsing in a car.

I am going to get to that.