And a judge in a case about a seventeen-year-old transaction wants a document.”

We spent eleven weeks looking.

The forensic accountant Arthur retained on the corporate side, a man named Desmond Pilcher, got the earliest general ledger data that survived, which began in 2011 and showed an opening balance and nothing about where it came from.

The Massachusetts registry of deeds gave us the deed out — the sale itself, recorded, public, forty dollars, and I could have got it in an afternoon at any point in eighteen years.

It proves I sold a house on the twenty-first of March 2008.