I said the address.

There was a pause that went on so long I thought the call had dropped.

And Gerald Lipinski said: “Brennan.

Your mother had hydrangeas in pots on the balcony and she asked me whether she could take them.”

He had done, by his own estimate, somewhere over four thousand closings in a forty-one-year career.

He also had, in a climate-controlled storage unit in Braintree that cost him a hundred and sixty-two dollars a month, every file from all of them.

I asked him why.