Those photographs were taken in my house in Palm Beach, in a room I paid for, in front of a window I chose, and they were posted on the internet on the eleventh of January, and on the eleventh of January I was in Huntsville, Alabama, at a source selection.

Part Four: Three Years

I should say who he was, and I am going to do it plainly, because the useful version of this story is not the one where I was a fool.

Christian Dupont was forty-one.

He ran a company called Dupont Enterprise Group, which his father founded in 1988 and which does facilities services and logistics support — grounds maintenance, custodial, warehouse staffing, vehicle fleet servicing — for institutional clients, including, in a way that became the whole of my problem, several federal ones.

We met in the March of 2021 at a fundraiser for a hospice in West Palm Beach that I went to because my mother made me.