Damian had leveraged everything and lost, and the debt had a clock on it, and my father’s paid-off house was the last unencumbered asset within his reach.
It was not greed anymore, by that Tuesday.
It was a man trying to save his own neck by feeding my family’s home to the people he was afraid of, and running out of time to do it.
And my father, it turned out, had known almost all of this for weeks — because while Damian had spent twelve years studying us, my father had spent the last two months, quietly and without a word to me, studying him back.
Chapter 10 — The Trap
My father had not been sitting alone in that house waiting to be robbed.
He had been building a case.
Months earlier, some instinct of his own had hardened into certainty, and he had done the thing my father always did with a problem — he’d gone and found the right tool.
In his case the tool was an old friend named Otis Duarte, a retired police investigator he’d known since they were boys, a man with the patience and the know-how to do the thing properly.
Together, quietly, they had pulled it apart.
Otis had turned up the fraudulent deed request Damian had already filed at the county clerk’s office, and the forged medical evaluation, sitting there in the record like a loaded gun waiting for a Friday.
And once they understood what they were looking at, they did not go to Damian and confront him, because a confrontation would only teach him to be careful.
They set a trap instead.
My father would play the part Damian already believed — the failing, frightened old man, easy to push — and let him say the whole thing out loud.