So Jace did not simply show up with a document and a pen. He arrived the next morning with an entourage.

First through the door, at Jace’s side, was a board-certified psychiatrist — a woman with reading glasses on a chain and a manner as calm as still water.

She sent everyone but a nurse out of the room, sat with Roderick for the better part of forty minutes, and asked him a long, patient series of questions: the date, the name of the president, the value of his holdings, the reasons for what he wanted to do, whether anyone had pressured him, whether he understood the consequences for his wife.

Roderick answered all of it, slowly but without a single stumble. When she came out she signed a statement, on the record, attesting that in her professional judgment Roderick Benedict was fully conscious, entirely lucid, and acting of his own free will, under no coercion and no confusion.

Then the witnesses came in. Teresa Pearson, the chief financial officer of Roderick’s company, a sharp, unsentimental woman who had run his numbers for nine years and trusted him more than she trusted most people.

And Seth Coleman, his former business partner, who had built the second plant with him back when they were both younger men with more nerve than sense, and who had wept, briefly and privately, in the hallway before he came in.