He set out, years earlier, only to avoid the small discomfort of doing his own job, of reading the invoices he signed, of asking the hard questions.

And that small, ordinary laziness compounded, year over year, into complicity in a fraud, and then, when the fraud threatened to surface, into complicity in something far worse, because at each step the honorable choice had grown more costly and the cowardly one more tempting.

Marcus never chose to be a man who would help cover up his brother’s murder.

He simply never chose, at any of the hundred small forks along the way, to be a man who would not.