He lay in the dark of the primary bedroom with his hands laced on his chest and stared at the ceiling and turned it over and over, and what kept him awake was not that he believed it.

It was that he could not prove it wasn’t true.

And so, at four-fifteen in the morning, Chadworth Prescott made a decision that he would later describe, without any softening, as the only intelligent thing he did in that entire year — for entirely the wrong reasons.

He decided to watch.

Part Five: The Room Nobody Went Into

He called Barnaby Reyes at five-forty in the morning, which was not unusual.

Barnaby had run security for the Prescott properties for eleven years and had long ago stopped being surprised by the hours.