There was no version of I can pay it back that came from an innocent man; you do not offer to repay money you never took.

Silas had walked in braced to bluff, and one look at the matched columns had knocked the bluff clean out of him, and what came out instead was the thing underneath, the plea of a person who knows the game is over and is already negotiating the terms of the loss.

Corwin had wondered, on the drive in, whether he might feel some flicker of the old doubt, whether Silas might have an explanation that complicated the neat picture the records painted.

He did not.

The young man’s own mouth had closed the case in six words before Corwin had asked a single real question.

And sitting there watching Silas fold, Corwin felt the last of his certainty about the whole affair rearrange itself into its final, correct shape: the confident young manager he had trusted without a second thought was the thief, and the quiet old woman he had humiliated in front of six people was exactly who she had always appeared to be.