But the discarded talk to each other.

The nurse he framed ended up, by the crooked arithmetic of the justice system, working the same facility where he’d sent his own wife, and she recognized my name, and she made a choice.

That is the thing men like Roman never account for: that the people they step on do not disappear, they accumulate, and they remember, and they wait, and all it takes is one of them finding one of the others in a laundry room for the whole careful structure to begin coming down.

He built his empire on the assumption that the people beneath him would stay beneath him.