He had spoken at my father’s funeral, and I had believed the grief in his voice, and perhaps some fraction of it had even been real; men like Charles are often sincere in the small emotions while committing the enormous crime.

And now I watched two decades of his careful, unhurried theft collapse in the space of a red screen, and what I felt was not the hot rush of revenge I might have expected.

It was closer to the cold clean feeling of a proof completing itself — the last line of a long equation resolving, at last, to the answer I had known was coming since I was twenty-eight years old and first found the thread.

He had made one error, in the end, and it was the same error Nathan made, the same error every one of them made: he could not believe I was real.