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At 65, Francis had begun to measure his life in absences. Like the promotion that never came. The business he never started. The many betrayals of people whom he had trusted. He sat every evening on the narrow veranda of his modest home, watching the road gather dust and dissolve into dusk. Somewhere, in another version of life, he told himself, he would have been a man people spoke about differently: with admiration, perhaps even a touch of envy. In reality, ho...
