Give him room.
A good parent knows when to stop asking. The letters had reframed his parents’ natural longing to hear their son’s voice as a selfish imposition on a struggling man, so that every impulse they had to check on him got quietly rerouted into guilt.
It was a machine designed to run on love.
The more his parents loved him, the more silent it made them.
Ezra had seen a lot of financial fraud in his line of work, dry schemes built of numbers and shell accounts.
He had never seen anything as intimate, or as cold, as a stack of letters engineered to make two good people love their son into silence.