Blackmail: The Trap You Allow
The real trap wasn’t Scornson. Greg built it himself.
This is a story for adults, but the lesson Greg learns is one most of us first faced as kids.
This week I want to talk about Greg Newman.
When I was writing The Good, The Bad, and The Undecided, the character I found most interesting was a practical, ambitious man who got backed into a corner and had to decide what kind of person he actually was.
Greg is not a villain. He’s not a hero either, at least not at first. He’s a man who has spent his whole career trying to get ahead, and that ambition leaves a door open that Scornson is all too happy to walk through. The blackmail itself is almost secondary — the real trap is the one Greg set for himself.
There’s a moment in Chapter Five where Greg is asked, “What exactly did Scornson say?” — and he has to replay the conversation in his head. And he realizes, slowly and painfully, that the president was never mentioned. He assumed. He wanted it to be true badly enough that he made it true in his own mind.
That’s the dilemma I keep coming back to: not what do you do when someone threatens you, but what do you do when the trap you’re in is partly one you built yourself?
Greg’s mother had a saying: if you’re already in a hole, the best thing to do is stop digging. Whether Greg takes that advice — and what it costs him — is what this story is all about.
📖 https://books2read.com/TGTBaTU
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Until next week,
Tony
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