Some doors a mother has to keep closed in order to go on standing up.

And there was the money.

The investigators followed it the way investigators do, and it led exactly where Reyes had said it would — to a large, unlawful payment Damon had made only days before Tessa died, to the sort of supplier no honest man has any reason to know.

He had paid for what killed her, and the record of the payment sat in a bank’s files, patient and permanent, long after he thought the fire would take care of everything.

That was the irony that stayed with me.