Maybe that was the only reason it was real.

Months passed.

The news cycle is ruthless and efficient.

The scandal of my sudden resignation, the divorce, the liquidation, held the financial pages for a few weeks and then faded.

I surrendered the Greenwich estate.

I sold the penthouses and the boats.

I kept enough to live comfortably and put the rest — an irrevocable, anonymous trust — aside for Auberon’s future, and dismantled the grotesque bulk of the empire, brick by brick, with something close to relief.

Chapter 12 — The Door, Cracked Open