What there was, instead, was a whole cast of ordinary people who had each done a smaller thing: a brother who saw a coma and thought first of the succession; a wife who saw an opening and reached for cash; a driver who took money to forget a detail; a finance man who reformatted some numbers he was told not to look at too closely; a mother who decided, over and over, that it was kinder not to ask.

Not one of them had tried to kill Garrett.

Every one of them had been willing to profit from his nearly dying.

That is the more common evil, I have come to think, and the more frightening for being common — not the dramatic wickedness that runs a man off a road, but the quiet, respectable willingness to take advantage of a tragedy someone else supplied.

It does not require a black heart.