And the trademarks — the name, the logo, the brand that Flynn’s whole charming public identity was built on — those were registered to my holding company too, because years earlier, when the filings had to be done, Flynn had waved them off as boring paperwork and let me handle it, the way he let me handle everything that was boring and turned out, in the end, to be everything that mattered.

And three months before the foyer, when I first began to smell the fraud, I had done one more careful thing.

I had renegotiated our arrangement with the company’s largest lender, adding a clause that gave that lender the right to review the integrity of the company’s management if credible allegations of fraud ever emerged.

I had built, in other words, a tripwire, and I had built it directly into the money.

Flynn had not built a castle and generously let his wife live in a room of it.

He had it exactly backward, as he had everything exactly backward.