This was a man sitting down at a desk, three weeks before his brother’s death, and filling out a form that would pay him for it.

He hadn’t only silenced Porter to bury the fraud.

He had arranged to profit from the burial.

There is a particular cruelty in that detail that I still cannot fully hold in my mind: that Dax had looked at his brother’s life and seen, on the same page, both a threat to be removed and an asset to be liquidated, and had felt no contradiction between the two.

Waylon watched my face and said, quietly, that he was sorry, that he’d suspected for months and told himself it wasn’t his business, and that he could not live with it anymore.