“No.”
“Did you know the submitted summary was incomplete?”
Gregory hesitated.
“No. But I should have.”
That hesitation told me he had already spent many hours asking himself the same question.
“Who prepared Daniel’s medical exhibits?”
“An outside elder-care consulting firm.”
Rachel wrote down the name.
“Who hired them?”
“I suggested them.”
Daniel signed the engagement.
The mystery had become less dramatic and more troubling.
There was no mastermind sitting in a dark room.
There were people.
Busy people.
Concerned people.
People who trusted summaries.
People who assumed someone else had checked.
People who acted on partial information because the consequences of waiting frightened them.
Sometimes, I realized, lives were changed not by one terrible decision but by six reasonable decisions made by people who never compared notes.
The independent evaluation took place the following day.
Dr. Priya Shah spent nearly four hours with me.
She asked about my companies.
