“He owned it.

From the very beginning, he owned all of it.”

Chapter 9 — The Shape of It

It took me some time, in that vestry, with the rain coming harder against the windows, to understand the shape of the thing my father had been part of, and my mind kept refusing it, the way you refuse a step that isn’t there in the dark.

The Bennett Foundation — the charity that had put my father’s name on hospital wings and gala programs across the state, the good works that were supposed to be the one unimpeachable thing about him — had never been what it appeared.

It was a machine, owned in secret by a sitting United States Senator, and it had been used, for years, not merely to launder money and buy influence, but to do something so cold I could not at first make my mind hold it.