Nathan Fletcher had grown from that little boy making twenty-four-hour four-point contact with his mother during his father’s kidnapping into not so much a whole man but a collection of tics: a composite panic attack whose brain lived in both the unspeakable past and the terrifying future and rarely in a particular current moment unless that moment contained more fear than the past and future put together and therefore deserved his complete attention. It was the fear that always felt like the truth to him.
