He had simply moved it, the way he had moved the money, quietly, into an account I could not reach.

And he had let me believe, all the while, that the account was empty, that he simply did not have it in him anymore, that I was asking too much of a tired man.

That was the lie underneath the lie, and it was the one that took me longest to forgive myself for believing.

Chapter 5 — Pick Up Milk

I sat there in the blue light of the screen and I thought about what my own messages from Julian had looked like, over the past three years, and the comparison was almost unbearable in its plainness.