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That’s what I told myself at six in the morning. Sitting here at twenty past midnight, the logic still works. It still isn’t honest.

The address is a thirty-minute problem, and I make it a two-hour one.

The clean route is to hand the name to Roth. That’s what Roth is for. His retainer assumes eleven or twelve of these calls a month. Researching a residential address tied to a business filing plus truck registration would take him less time than it takes me to describe the request.

I drive out instead.

I drive east past the rail crossing, then past the yard with its new chain on the gate. Eleven minutes farther is a street of small houses with aluminum awnings, boats under tarps in half the drives. Number forty-one. Blue vinyl siding. A porch light nobody turns on. A contractor’s truck in the drive with lettering on the door.

I don’t get out. I sit at the curb with the engine off for six minutes and confirm what I already knew from a registration document.

There’s a garden gnome at the corner of the step with its face worn off. A ramp of new pressure-treated lumber runs up the side of the porch, built well, probably by Fin, leading to a door nobody in that house needs a ramp for. A neighbor, then. Done for free on a weekend, badly timed against eleven weeks of unpaid payroll.

Two lights burn in a house occupied by one man with a hand he can’t use.

Then I drive back into the city and file it in the routine report under ASSOCIATED PARTIES—the house number, street, and the fact that he lives there alone. There’s no point in holding back; she has three other ways to get this information.

I add four lines:

Recommendation: further approach to the brother is not advised at this stage. The subject’s cooperation is entirely contingent on the brother’s safety, which he has raised unprompted twice in six days. He’s asked for nothing else. Contact escalates a cooperative asset into a frightened one at no gain. The account is on schedule without it.

Every word is true. I’ve built recommendations for this woman for nine years. I know the exact temperature at which she accepts one: no adjectives, no concern, no moral content. Only a reason that costs her money if she ignores it.

She replies at 9:40 with one word. Accepted.

I look at the screen. The address is hers now. Nothing I did today protected anyone. I only made sure the man who drove out to look at Fintan Doyle’s front door was me, not Leonard Roth.

I close the laptop.

The reconciliation takes three days.

Four years. Four accounts. One credit card he uses for gas, nothing else. One savings vehicle his agent set up when he was twenty-two, untouched since. I do it properly because I do everything properly. The file will eventually be read by somebody who isn’t me.

The pattern comes up on the second afternoon.

A standing transfer to DOYLE CONTRACTING LLC lands on the first business day of every month. It appears in the oldest statement I have, so I pull the year before. Then the year before that. The transfer is in both.

Sixty-one months.

Fintan Doyle borrowed from Vera Lindqvist two years ago last month. The transfers began three years before that: four months after Kieran Doyle signed his first professional contract at twenty-two. They haven’t missed a month in five years, and the amount has never gone down.

He didn’t start paying because his brother got into trouble. He started paying when he had money.

I sit with that in an office with the blinds shut, car wash renewals filed, desk otherwise empty.

I’ve collected from a hundred and forty men. I can tell you what most were doing with the money before it stopped being theirs. Usually it was a boat, a second household, a habit, an idea about themselves they couldn’t afford. I’ve never found a schedule like this in a set of books—sixty-one months of a man quietly paying for the privilege of having been raised by his brother.

I print it.

Twelve pages, the full schedule, month by month with a running total at the foot of each year. The correct move is to attach it to the file as evidence of capacity. It proves he’ll part with money under emotional pressure, without limit, for as long as someone he loves needs it. That’s the fact Vera would price immediately.

I read it a fourth time. Year one: twenty-two years old, league minimum, transfers of eleven hundred a month. Year three: second contract, transfers up to six thousand. Two years ago, the amount doubled without explanation. That’s the month a man in a shipping office wrote Fintan Doyle’s name into a book.

Nothing in five years ever comes back the other way. No payment reverses. No line anywhere shows money moving from the brother to the man who’s paying for him.

I fold it in half and put it in my own bag, in the pocket where I keep my passport.

It’s not a decision I’d usually make. I would like to pretend it is. I stand at the window. A gantry crane lowers a container onto a chassis without a sound I can hear from here.