He was not a man who did not know the truth.

He was a man who worked, daily, to keep from knowing it — and those are different things, and the second is worse.

The banking app was on his phone the whole time.

The transfers labeled From Posy Merrick arrived every month, sitting there, waiting to be seen by anyone who cared to look.

Everett’s certified letters had come to the apartment.

A grandmother’s-worth of red flags waved in his peripheral vision for four years, and every single time one of them threatened to enter his awareness, he looked away, poured another drink, and reached for the story where he was the one who’d been wronged.