He believed it.

That was the thing I kept returning to, even then.

Leon truly believed there were two million dollars behind that steel door, and he believed it because our father had let him believe it — had let him go on picturing the treasure right up to the end, because our father had understood something about his son that his son had never understood about himself.

What our father understood was this: that Leon could not stop.

That a man who had already stolen one point eight million dollars and dressed it in false invoices was not going to be reformed by a stern conversation, or a second chance, or a third.

Leon’s greed was not a phase or a mistake; it was the load-bearing structure of his whole personality, the thing everything else was built around.