Emiliano had always been a gifted performer — it was, I understood now, the only real skill he had, the thing he had used to win me and my board and every investor in that garden.

He knew exactly when to let his voice break.

He knew to look down at the folder as though the weight of his new responsibility pained him.

He knew which of the guests were sentimental and aimed the catch in his throat at them.

Watching him grieve me while I sat alive twenty feet away, I felt the last thread of anything I had ever felt for him quietly snap, and what replaced it was not hatred but a cold professional contempt.

Because I had spent my career around people who built real things — engineers who stayed up all night solving problems that had no glamour in them at all — and I knew the difference between building something and performing the ownership of it.