“You come out the moment you sign those transfers,” Logan shouted through the door, before sliding the metal bolt shut.

For three days I sat with my back against that door and listened to him take business calls on the other side of it. He did not know the sound carried.

He argued with a broker named Martin about fake invoices and duplicated loans and an offshore transfer that had to clear before my father came home, and I heard the whole of it, and I had no way to write any of it down.

He recorded his own calls. He had done it for years — a little digital thing he used for business notes, because he did not trust his memory and did not trust anyone else’s either.

On the third night, a thunderstorm struck the coast. Logan was away at a hotel, meeting the loan shark. Using a rusty pipe, I pried open a small iron window grate — and then, before I climbed through it, I went back out into the dark of the basement and felt along the floor by the bottom stair until I found the recorder where he had left it.

I put it in my waterproof pouch with the stolen contracts. Then I squeezed through the narrow gap and ran barefoot into the pouring rain toward the highway.