He had no idea that the containment was already over.

I almost felt something like pity, watching him steer us toward that back table with his practiced host’s hand at my elbow, because he was fighting so hard to manage a situation that had already escaped him entirely, and he did not know it.

This was, I would come to understand, the great blind spot in a man like Julian.

He believed, at his core, that reality was something you managed, that with enough charm and enough control of the room you could keep any truth in whatever box you had assigned it.