[Author's note: Hoping to post a new lesson bi-weekly.]

Cortland had said I would make a bad end of it. And the words of the dead are most biting to those who killed them.

To the finder of these works, consider them my confessions. Though they have passed freely from my lips to these pages, I write them with a great pain. Not for those who have been hurt by what I did, or led them to believe, but for my own fate wrestled from my control. Collected here is my life, and while it was not always clear what turns it would take, I now find it at its logical end.

While much has been said on my behalf, I hope that here I can remain as honest on paper as I was in life. To myself. Because I believed little that was said about me, for me, by me, and almost none of that to me. Honestly, only an idiot or liar could.

So if any of what follows seems ridiculous or self-serving, understand this wasn’t meant for you. To those who can commiserate, you will already know the lessons I teach. I’ve decided to go out as the same damned honest gentleman I began. I’ll draw out all the lies and heresy with a knife. Cortland knew then what would mark my end, and I would now answer—

“I am not what I used to be.”