There was only impatience, and the brisk proprietary manner of a man come to collect what he considered his.

I studied him in those first seconds, this man I had spent six months impersonating without ever seeing again since the office, and I was struck by how little there was to him.

I had built him up, over those months, into a kind of shadow that fell across all my visits, the reason for the lie, the absent villain whose place I filled.

I had imagined he must be tormented, somewhere underneath, by what he was doing to his mother, that no one could truly be as hollow as the arrangement suggested.