He started talking at night.
Not insomnia talk, not the restless commentary of a man who could not sleep. Deliberate, late-night conversations that he had started initiating after Ava went down and the apartment went quiet, the kind of conversations that required dark and low voices and no agenda.
I had come to look forward to them.
One night in February he said, "I want to tell you something I haven't told anyone."
"Tell me," I said.
"When I was twenty-four, before I started the company, I walked away from a partnership because I was afraid the other person was better than me. I told myself it was a values difference. It wasn't."
"What was it?"
"Insecurity," he said. "I have done a lot of things in my life from insecurity and called them by other names. Ambition. Practicality. Inde
