“Julian.” I paused. The thing I had come to say — not for him, for me, because Sebastian had been right about that and wrong about only one thing, which was the reason. I wasn’t here for nothing. I was here to say this. “Whatever you told yourself about why you did what you did — the market competition, the monopoly, the four years of legitimate channels — it doesn’t change what it became. And what it became was a two year campaign that used real people and real families and real feelings as instruments.” I held his gaze. “I hope somewhere in the time you have ahead of you, you find the distance to understand that. Not for my benefit. For yours.”
Julian looked at me.
For a long moment he just looked at me with the dark focused eyes that missed very little and the surface that gave almost
