Then I left the study and locked it behind me and went to help with dinner, carrying the knowledge of that lever the way you carry a lit match cupped against the wind, aware of it every second, letting no one see it burn.

The discipline of not opening the panel that first afternoon is, I think, the single thing I am proudest of in this whole account, and it is the least dramatic.

Anyone can be brave in the loud moment.

The harder thing, the rarer thing, is patience in the quiet one, the willingness to find the hiding place and then walk away from it, to sit at dinner that night across from the man whose secret you have just located and to pass him the salt.

Everything I had would have been worth nothing if I had torn that panel open in my first excitement and left it ajar, because the instant Jonathan saw that his concealment had been breached, he would have moved the evidence, moved the money, moved Rowena herself to some clinic I could never trace, and I would have been left with nothing but a story no one would believe.