Chapter 16 — Telling My Father

The hardest thing I did in the whole affair was not opening the safe.

It was driving up to my parents’ estate that afternoon to tell my father that the home he’d spent his life building had been mortgaged out from under him with his own forged name.

My father is named Lorne Hartman, and for my entire life he had been the fixed point I navigated by — the man who had built a company from a foothill ranch, who had never once in seventy years met a problem he couldn’t out-work or out-wait.

He was in his study when I laid the photographs on his desk, and I watched that fixed point go very still, the way I had gone still at the bottom of my stairs.

“Desmond,” he said, at last.