He had known exactly what I did for a living, had counted on my skills being aimed at work and never at him, and the one time I’d turned them on his own proposal and caught it, he had recalibrated the entire scheme to happen where I wasn’t looking.
My competence had scared him.
Not enough to stop him — nothing stopped him — but enough to make him careful, enough to make him wait two more years and go around me in the dark.
There is a bitter kind of pride in that, and I let myself feel a flicker of it even under the table: that the man had had to reorganize a twelve-year con because his target’s daughter could read a balance sheet.
Then I heard my father’s chair creak, and the soft heavy sound of a thick folder dropping onto the wood.
“You brought this by last week, too, Damian,” my father said.
“Let’s talk about this.”
Chapter 6 — The Folder
Damian’s voice changed then.
The warm salesman fell away, and something colder and flatter came out from under it — the real voice, I would come to understand, the one I had lived beside for twelve years and somehow never once heard.
“That’s a medical evaluation, Glenn,” he said.
“An official one.
Look — you’ve been forgetting things.
Losing track of dates.