Then he asked, almost inaudibly, whether Tommy had been asking about him.

“Yes,” I said.

“He asks when you’re coming.”

Mark shut his eyes.

That question, not the mortgage, finally seemed to reach him.

PART 9

When I first brought Sarah the stack of papers, she did not congratulate me on discovering the loans.

She spread everything across a conference table and told me that I had a dangerous amount of information and several dangerous assumptions.