And it had worked, as it was designed to work, as it had presumably worked on the other families whose names the audit would later surface, because that was the actual product his family’s legal department manufactured: not justice, and not even really defense, but the reliable transformation of a company’s catastrophic wrong into a grieving stranger’s cheap and binding silence.

Corbin had grown up believing his family were builders.

Standing in that apartment, he understood that the most sophisticated thing they built was this.

Chapter 10 — The Matriarch

The room fell silent until another voice spoke from the doorway.

“Corbin.

That is quite enough of this.”

He turned to see his mother, Vivian Stanford, stepping into the small apartment in an elegant gray wool coat.