Michael did not sleep.
He lay on his couch with the lights off, the city bleeding in through the blinds in fractured lines, replaying the morning over and over until the sequence lost coherence and became something darker, less memory than grievance.
He had not lost control, he told himself.
He had been ambushed.
By security. By optics. By a version of Alicia that had been curated for effect.
That was the story he settled on, because the alternative was intolerable.
The alternative was that she no longer feared him.
That she no longer oriented herself around him at all.
That the gravity he had once exerted, the subtle pull that had shaped her decisions, her posture, her silence, had simply… stopped.
Michael rolled onto his side, jaw tight.
That man had been the final insult.
Not
