Chapter 10 — Dustin Crowder

I found a private investigator named Dustin Crowder, a retired state investigator working out of a plain office downtown, the kind of man whose walls held no diplomas, only a coffee maker and a locked filing cabinet and a face that had heard everything.

I sat across from him and told him all of it — the court, the airport, the card, the six million, the way my son had changed.

He listened the whole way through without interrupting once, which I would come to understand was its own kind of skill.

Going to Dustin was the first thing I did that the old version of me — the one Lachlan had built — would never have done.

For fifteen years I had solved every problem by absorbing it, by going quiet, by managing my own feelings so as not to trouble anyone.