And while I waited, I opened the older files on the phone, and found the thing I had photographed a month earlier off Christopher’s home-office desk — after he had started receiving urgent letters from a debt-restructuring firm he would not explain.

It was a loan application.

For over six hundred thousand dollars.

The collateral listed on it was my downtown commercial building — the building he had no legal right to touch — and the application noted, in plain terms, that a signed power of attorney would be provided before the closing date.

And at last the frantic rush at the hospital made perfect, sickening sense.

Without my signature, his fraudulent loan collapsed.