Because the alternative was sixty-three people in Atlanta who believe I took their money, and there was no one else in the world who was going to correct that.

Chapter 14 — The Eggs

I went to Ohio on the twentieth, which was not in the plan.

It was in the plan by the eighteenth, because on the seventeenth Dolores mentioned, in passing, over a plate of eggs, that Everett had been out of the office for a full week in March of that year — before the London announcement, before any of it — and that he’d said he was helping his parents with a property matter.

March. Eleven weeks before he told me he was going to London.

I called Gavin from the hotel and asked him to pull the Preble County records, which took his paralegal about an hour, because it is a public database and I could have done it myself at any point in two years and had simply never thought to look.

The house sold on the twenty-eighth of March. One hundred and forty-two thousand dollars. Walter and Shirley Whitlock, sellers. A quitclaim eleven days earlier had put Everett’s name on the deed alongside theirs, which is a thing adult children do for perfectly ordinary estate-planning reasons and which is also a thing you do when you are about to sell a house.