It was the work of a man who had thought hard about the day the knock might come, and had arranged, long in advance, for it to come to someone else’s door.

I did not understand yet how to stop it.

But I understood, kneeling on that floor, exactly what it was.

And I understood that my brother was standing directly beneath it, holding it up, with no idea that it was built to fall on him alone.

I have audited a great many schemes in my career, and the cruelest ones are always the ones built this way — designed from the first day with a person already chosen to absorb the blame, a human shock absorber installed before the machine is ever switched on.

Jim had not stumbled into the bottom of this.