I had sat at their holiday tables and let Denton carve the roast and thought of them, in my worst private moments, as merely cold — snobbish, controlling, disappointed that Porter had chosen an accountant from Baltimore.

I had never once imagined that the money paying for those roasts had been laundered out of a dead man’s blood, that the family fortune I’d been made to feel unworthy of was itself the proceeds of a crime that had put an innocent man, Jaime Jimenez, in a cell for the better part of his life.

The condescension I’d swallowed for years suddenly looked almost quaint beside what lay under it.

These were not merely difficult people.