Even my own lawyer sat by my bed and calmly, professionally, discussed emergency control of my trusts and the movement of my offshore accounts, as though I were already a legal formality rather than a living man.

I lay there and heard all of it, and I wanted, more than I have ever wanted anything, to open my eyes and destroy every one of them.

Instead, I endured.

Because I understood that the value of my false coma increased with every hour I maintained it, that each person who spoke freely over my body was handing me, unknowingly, the evidence of their own betrayal, and that the moment I revealed myself, that flow of truth would stop.

So I stayed still, and I catalogued them, one by one, the weeping adviser and the modernizing cousin and the supportive politician and the calm lawyer, and I understood that the empire I had spent my life building had been, the entire time, rotted through with people waiting for me to die.