He was not driven by some vast dark hunger.

He was driven by money, plain money, and by the particular cowardice of a man who has spent more than he has and cannot bear to be found out — the oldest and most common motive there is.

He had married a woman with a family trust and he had looked at that trust the way some men look at everything, as a thing that ought to be his, and he had helped himself, and when the helping-himself was discovered he had not felt shame or offered restitution or done any of the things a person with a conscience might do.

He had simply escalated, coldly, doing whatever the next thing was that kept him from consequences, and each next thing was worse than the last, and none of them felt to him, I suspect, like the acts of a monster — they felt like problem-solving.

That is what I could not get past, sitting in that hospital.

Not that a demon had come for my family, but that a small greedy frightened man had, and that a small greedy frightened man is enough.