I will describe only what it meant, not the cold detail of watching it.

It was a recording, made secretly inside the Senator’s own private conference room three months earlier by someone in his circle who had evidently decided to build insurance of their own.

And on it, Senator Robert Vance, sitting at the head of a glass table, discussed the coming problem of my wedding — of the daughter who might, once she married the investigator, come to understand what her father had done — and made clear, in flat, unhurried language, that I was to be considered a risk to be managed after the ceremony.

I sat very still as the meaning of it arrived.

The man had planned to have me killed.

Not in rage, not in passion — as a scheduling matter, an item of business to be handled once the useful distraction of my father’s arrest had drawn everyone’s eyes.