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They don’t want me to go.

A doctor explains what a fracture of the orbital floor can do if the eye drops into it. At nine in the morning, I sign a form on a clipboard while a nurse witnesses. She says, not unkindly, that people who sign that form are usually drunk.

“I’m not drunk.”

“No,” she says. “You’re worse.”

Fin Doyle has left a bag on the chair—a clean shirt of his own, four inches too big in the shoulders; a phone charger, a paper cup of tea gone cold with a parking receipt underneath it that I haven’t paid for. He’s gone home to work. There’s a school district job in the valley, men waiting on him at seven, and I told him twice to go.

I get the shirt on in eleven minutes. Every one of the buttons is a separate event.

The rental car is where I left it on Thursday with the driver’s door unlocked and the key still in my coat.

Driving isn’t good.

The eye is the problem more than the ribs. Swelling has taken a patch of the world on the left about the size of a hand. Turning my head that way pulls the right side of my chest, so I spend the two hours nine miles under the limit with the mirror set wrong. Twice I stop at roadside pullouts to breathe.

I get to Ashgate at half past one.

I don’t go straight to the federal building. My apartment has a hard drive taped under a kitchen drawer, so I go there first. Getting onto the floor to reach it takes four minutes. Then I sit against my own cupboards with a plastic rectangle in a padded envelope in my hand. I’ve seen somebody else sit like this. I haven’t done it myself.

The notebook is in the bag already—black, elastic across it, nine years of the wrong kind of bookkeeping in five-line entries.

The transfer records are in a box file. Four months of them.

I drive to the federal building on Cormack Street and park on the second level of the garage at ten past three. I don’t go straight in.

I sit in the car with the engine off and go through the bag on the passenger seat, item by item, because the last thing a man in my position wants is to be standing at a security desk finding out what he’s forgotten.

The notebook has a back cover with a pocket in it.

The stub is in the pocket.

Saint Brigid’s visitor lot, 11:13 p.m., soft along the crease from a wallet. On the back, in a hand that presses hard enough to emboss the reverse: 1,400,000. Under it, 11,406. A line. Under the line, 4,160, with a check mark beside it.

I took it from the inside pocket of a canvas jacket on a Tuesday afternoon in February while its owner was at an optional skate. I read it standing in his hallway. Then I didn’t put it back. I’ve never found a satisfactory business reason for that.

Kieran tore his truck apart looking for it. He went through his stall twice.

I get out of the car with the notebook in my hand. In the stairwell, a trash can is bolted to the wall. I open the back cover and hold the stub over it between two fingers.

Nine words and four numbers in his own handwriting are physical evidence that he knew the size of a debt owed to an illegal betting operation. I’m carrying that evidence into a building where the question is what he knew and when.

The trash can has a swing lid with a coffee cup wedged in it. Two levels down, a car alarm goes off and stops. My arm stays extended over the lid. My ribs object, but I don’t move.

Drop it, and there’s one page fewer for a man in shirtsleeves to hold up in eleven months. That’s the argument. It’s a good one.

Against it there’s only Kieran on a kitchen floor at four in the morning in November, writing down a number he’d just been handed in a hospital corridor. Writing it down was all he had. He’s spent his life refusing to let anybody carry a figure for him. He wrote this one by hand, folded it into his wallet, kept it for three months, and added to it twice. Then he tore his truck apart when it disappeared. He kept the figure because the figure was real, even when everything around it was built to make him doubt himself. I know that because I watched him check every number twice.

I stand there long enough that a woman comes out of the stairwell door and walks around me.

Then I put the stub back in the notebook pocket. I close the cover and snap the elastic across it.

I have no good reason.

The room is on the fourth floor. It has a table, six chairs, and nothing on the walls.

I’ve met Frances Yeardley once, in a corridor at the arena in the last week of March. Priya Raman introduced me as Kieran Doyle’s financial manager. I answered two questions about my practice, then put her card in my wallet behind the dentist’s.