I was just staying silent while it got more dangerous.” He’d found the phantom invoices six months before, he told me; when he’d tried to raise it with me, Devon had turned up unannounced at his office within the hour, and that was when my father understood I was being watched.

So he’d hired Cordray privately, and set Constance to copying every document, and when the stroke came before he could finish, Dr.

Fairbanks had carried the plan the rest of the way.

“I squeezed your hand that night,” he said, “because I heard you tell me you knew.

It was the only muscle I had left.”

We sat with that for a while, the machines ticking quietly around us.