It was his, arriving at last.

People expected me, I think, to gloat, and were sometimes almost disappointed when I did not.

There is an appetite, in stories like mine, for the ruin of the villain, for the satisfying spectacle of the cheater losing everything.

And Julian did lose a great deal.

But I found, when it came, that I had no hunger for it.

Partly this was because ruin is rarely as clean or as satisfying in life as it is in a story; the man who lost his title and repaid the funds was also, still, Leo’s father, and every loss of Julian’s was in some small way also a loss to my son, a diminishment of the man he would grow up having to reckon with.

This was the one part of it I could not make clean, and I stopped trying.