A late-night financial report showed the last public photograph of Julian Sterling. The long-lens image caught him outside a car, thin and unshaven, with his coat hanging open.
According to the reporter, he lived alone in the Sterling family’s forgotten country manor.
“Sources say he spends most days in a dark screening room, replaying the same home videos.”
One of those videos appeared on the screen. At seventeen, I sat in my mother’s garden with a design portfolio on my knees.
I laughed as I explained a necklace made from captured starlight, waving one sketch until it slipped from my hand. The camera shook when the person filming laughed with me.
“He has lost everything,” the reporter said. “A ghost haunting the ruins of his own making.”
Then she moved on to the next fallen company
