Is this why everything is so different? He was mad at the end. Alexander is frowning, not at the sentiment, but because the idea makes his mind spin and spin. It doesn't feel as though he was mad, then. It feels as though the world around him was one thing and now it is another. It feels that what is real upended itself, with Burr at the center. He's pretended past it, imagined that things have just changed, or that he was wrong, but he'd been so certain then, even awash in his soul's agony, from his son's death. He even misses that certainty, sometimes.

Why don't you love me? Why don't you love me enough? -- is what he wanted to ask when he wrote that letter. Is that what he really wanted to know? Or was there a more devastating question lurking just out of reach?

He twitches forward, towards Burr. Come home. He wants to come home.

"But I remember it," protests Alexander, desperately. "I remember choosing it. It was so clear -- I wanted to damn you, and I wanted it so much." He tangles his fingers in his own hair, his grip a tight fist. "I was him, I was -- if I'm not him, who am I?"