Chapter 5

"Emery," I said.

"Yeah," Emery's voice came from the air. It was soft and faint, but it was undeniably a human voice.

I kept my eyes shut and spoke into the darkness. "What do you want to talk about?"

"I want to tell you what you've been wanting to know," Emery said after a moment of silence.

"Then tell me," I said.

He told me a story.

The story was about a man in his early thirties. He had built a design firm from nothing, growing it from a handful of people to a few hundred, from a tiny studio…