I had trusted him with the daily operation of my command.

I had trusted him at my own dinner table.

And now every one of those warm, helpful gestures turned over in my memory and showed me its underside, and what had looked like an officer’s friendship revealed itself as the patient work of a man running an operation against the family of his own commander.

Memory is a terrible thing when it turns.

I sat in that hospital chair and watched two years of Rourke rewrite themselves in front of me, every scene playing again with the sound changed.

The gala in Raleigh, where he had steered me toward Preston with a hand on my elbow and an easy word — Colonel, you should meet this young man, good family — which I had received as a friend doing a friend a kindness, and which was, I now understood, the delivery of the target to the trap.