He had, we had all been told, died suddenly of a cardiac arrest at a small private clinic on the edge of Chicago.

And two days before that, he had said something to me that made no sense at the time and had refused to stop echoing since.

“If anything strange happens at the company tomorrow,” Mark had told me, his voice low and serious in a way I rarely heard from him, “don’t sign a single thing for Marcus.” Marcus was his older brother, and his business partner, the two of them co-owners of the cold-chain logistics firm they had inherited from their father.

When I asked Mark what was going on, what strange thing he expected, he had only shaken his head.