The first contract is there to be read.

It’s clean, it’s clear, it’s designed to satisfy you and send you home.

The trap is always in the second one — the amendment, the side letter, the schedule nobody photographs.

The first contract distracts you.

The second one takes everything.” I had thought he was talking about my work.

I understood now that he had been talking about his own trustee, and possibly warning me from years away, in the only language a careful man like my father knew how to use.

Because Charles’s scheme was built precisely like that.