DAMIEN'S POV
Julian called me the week he landed.
"Dinner," he said. Not a question exactly but not quite a demand either. Progress.
We met at a restaurant in midtown, just the two of us. No agenda stated. I arrived first and he came in five minutes later looking different in ways that were hard to specify. Same face, same posture, but something behind it had settled.
We ordered and talked about Cape Town for twenty minutes, the project timeline, the local team he'd built, a complication with a contractor that he'd resolved without calling me.
Then he said, "I want to talk about before."
I waited.
"The lawsuit. The Vivian situation. Everything I did when you first came back from the hospital." He held his wine glass without drinking. "I was looking for ways to benefit from your situ
