“Here’s the thing, though…” Parker took another drink, drawing enough from the bottle to all but empty it before he went back to speaking. “I tried very hard to stay good. To be well-behaved. To remain, in fact, the pleasure to work with that I was told that I was. But nobody notices the good things, John. They expected fits and tantrums. They wanted me to be a spoiled prince. So hard, in fact, that even if the attitude wasn’t there in the first place, they’d see it. It’s like, they painted a picture of who I was supposed to be, and how I was expected to act, and then just saw that picture as if it was me, regardless.”
He pointed at John with the bottle. “I didn’t put this mask on my face, John. The world around me did. Real me died when everybody else stopped seeing him. So you want me t
