I had probably bought nails in it.

And all those years it had been standing there collecting rent on the wreck of my seventeenth year, and I’d had no more idea than the sidewalk did.

Delroy had been proud of that building, I remembered now.

He’d talk about it at holidays, his little investment, his head for business, the one smart move that set him up.

He’d let the whole family admire him for turning nothing into something, and the nothing had been my settlement, and the something had been a lie he told at my kitchen table while my mother cried and I nodded in my cast.

That was the kind of man he was: not a dramatic villain, just a small, comfortable thief who liked to be complimented on the fruits of what he’d stolen.