Chapter 5: The First Performance — Daniel's Public Breakdown at Arlington

The tie was wrong.

Daniel stood in the bathroom mirror of his Georgetown apartment at six forty-seven in the morning, three days after he had stopped sleeping in any meaningful sense, and looked at the tie with the focused attention of a man solving a problem. Navy with a thin silver stripe. His father had given it to him two Christmases ago, extracting it from a flat box with that particular ceremonial care Marcus Vance brought to gift-giving, as though the unwrapping mattered as much as the thing unwrapped. Daniel had worn it twice. He remembered thinking, both times, that it was slightly too conservative. That it made him look like a junior senator.

He straightened it and left it wrong.