He’d driven to Canton one evening and parked down the street and just watched.

He had half-convinced himself that Claire was performing poverty to squeeze more money out of him.

What he saw instead was his wife walking home from the bus stop in the cold with grocery bags cutting into her hands and their sleeping daughter dead weight against her shoulder, and climbing the stairs to a building he wouldn’t have let a client live in.

“And then there was Owen’s birthday,” Jason said, and his voice finally broke on it.

“I canceled an hour before. For a meeting I could have moved. And that night your mother—” he looked at Ruth “—sent me a video of him blowing out his candles. And he never once looked at the door. He’d stopped even looking to see if I’d come.” He put a hand over his mouth for a second.

“I didn’t just take your house. I took away my kids’ ability to believe a single thing I say. That’s the something else. That’s what I found out.”