What I did not do — because he had told me not to — was decide anything else that night.

It turned out to be the most useful thing anyone told me in the whole of it.

Do not make another decision tonight.

It sounds like nothing.

It is, I have come to think, close to everything.

A scam does not only exploit greed or loneliness; it exploits the state of a tired, frightened, cornered person who feels they must act now, tonight, before the banks close, before the position is lost, before the window shuts.

My father, who knew nothing about Chad and understood the whole of it anyway, had handed me the single most powerful tool against that pressure, which is simply the refusal to be hurried — the permission to let the night pass, to sleep, to let the clearing window do its slow work, and to decide nothing until the morning had made the frightening thing a little smaller.