It was that his father was not who he had thought either — that the man whose confidence Callum had spent thirty years standing on had been, all along, a debtor one bad quarter from ruin, propped up by exactly the kind of borrowed money he sneered at other people for needing.

Everything Callum was had been built on the assumption that the Whitcombe money was bedrock.

In the space of one folder he was learning it had always been a raft, taking on water for years, and that the woman he had let his mother humiliate had just stopped bailing.

I almost felt for him.

Almost.

But I remembered the sunglasses going up his nose while I hung over the Atlantic, and the feeling passed.

Chapter 13 — The Assessment

Theodora let out a sharp, hysterical breath, her fingers clutching her pearls so hard the string looked ready to give.