“Christopher.”

“Did you see?”

“I saw.”

There was a pause in which he was clearly waiting for something, and I did not give it to him, and so he had to fill it himself, which is how he ended up saying the sentence out loud.

“I finally have the family you could never give me,” he said.

Behind my desk, on the glass wall I had put in when we renovated the study in 2019, there were forty-one pages taped up in six columns.

Bank statements.

A vendor ledger.

Three consulting agreements with a company called Halvard Strategic Partners.

Two years of wire transfers out of Vextor Dynamics, with about thirty of them circled in red, and arrows drawn between them in dry-erase marker.

I had been standing in front of that wall for nine weeks.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“I’ll need to send two gifts now, won’t I.

Do they have a registry?”