The preservation specialists had told him cloth that old naturally weakened no matter how carefully it was stored.
He had paid them anyway.
He had paid for temperature control, UV-resistant glass, archival treatment, everything money could buy.
But there were limits to what money could save.
He knew that better than most.
He looked at the ribbon every morning.
Where are you?
He never said the question out loud.
He did not have to.
It shaped the architecture of his life all by itself.
At nine years old, before he was worth anything, before his company had a board or a valuation or a tower with his name on a lease, Isaiah had been the skinny white boy standing outside the chain-link fence at Lincoln Elementary on Chicago’s South Side.
His mother, Colleen, had been working two temporary cleaning jobs after they were evicted from a one-bedroom apartment they could no longer afford.
