He said, “I don’t know.

Just — not like that.”

That sentence, in various forms, was said to me by about nine people over eighteen months. Not like that. Never with an alternative attached.

It is what people say when what they actually mean is that they would have preferred not to have had to know.

Two things eventually turned it.

The first was the Kroll report, or rather the fact of it.

When the board terminated for cause and the insurers declined, that told everybody in that world what the finding had been, without a word of it becoming public.