Miles Keaton had spent most of his adult life learning how to sound confident in a room full of confident people. He could shake hands like he meant it, smile like he wasn’t counting exits, and speak in short, polished sentences that made reporters write “visionary” and “relentless” in their headlines. At thirty-four, he was the kind of self-made millionaire people loved to summarize in one sentence—cybersecurity founder, acquisition at the perfect moment, new-money legend with the kind of glass-and-stone mansion that looked like it belonged on a magazine cover.

But the sentence didn’t include the quiet parts: the long pauses before he answered simple questions, the way the house echoed when you rolled across it alone, the way his phone lit up with invitations that felt like taunts. Two years earlier, on a wet night outside Lake Forest, Illinois, his life had folded in on itself with a shriek of metal and headlights that weren’t where they should have been. The aftermath wasn’t dramatic in the way people imagine accidents. It was ceilings. Hospital lights. Doctors using careful words that sounded like kindness but felt like a lock clicking into place. “Spinal trauma.” “Incomplete pathways.” “We’ll do everything we can.” And underneath all of it, the phrase he heard like a verdict: This is your new life.