“What if, on some level, way down deep inside, right down to the very simplest, purified form of who he was, what if he was corrupted? What if there was some tiny, tiny fault in the first building blocks of who he was, and everything since that moment of life was just papering over an essential crack? And he was just a carapace built on a facade built on scaffolding and there was no real core to him, no real central worth? At all?”