“I understand you,” I said. “And that’s what scares you.”

He let out a long, ragged breath that turned to mist in the freezing air.

For the first time, I saw the slump in his shoulders.

He looked tired, stripped of the expensive Italian suits and the ring of bodyguards.

He was just a man in a damp cabin, shivering in the Chicago winter.

I remembered the early days in our first apartment on the North Side.

We had nothing then but a mattress on the floor and a radiator that clanked all night.

He used to talk to me about his dreams, about buying a house with a yard near the lake.

But as the money grew, the talk stopped.

The silence grew between us like a physical wall, thick and cold.

“You stopped looking at me, Adrian,” I said.

“I was busy keeping us alive,” he said.

“You were busy hiding.”

He set the gun down on the wooden table, the heavy thud sounding like a gavel.

“I never lied to you about what I did,” he said.