I came alone. The vehicles are mine. The men are mine. and they will stay in the trees for as long as this conversation goes correctly. A pause.

I need 10 minutes with you and Silas. 10 minutes. After that, you can make any decision you want. You sent the envelope, she said.

The photographs, the note about the tree. No, he said I did not. Then who? 10 minutes, he said.

Please. She lowered the phone and looked across the bay. Decker was at the far wall with his hand near the radio. Rex had killed the Shovelhead's engine and was standing beside it with a wrench in his hand that he wasn't going to use as a wrench.

Crane was in the doorway to the back room and behind him she could see the edge of the light where Eleanor was and the sound of the television program coming through as a thin thread of normality through everything else. Silas came out of the back room. His phone was in his hand, and his face was the closed particular expression of a man who had just ended a very difficult call and was carrying the weight of it visibly for the first time she'd seen. "He looked at Ria," he looked at her face.

"Who called you?" he said. "Puit," she said. "He's at the tree line. He wants 10 minutes." The room went absolutely still.

Even the propane heater seemed to hold. Silas looked at the east wall as though he could see through it. his jaw set and released a motion she'd learned to read as him processing something at a level below language. You say anything else? Silas said he said he didn't send the envelope.

Silas looked at her. You believe him? I don't know yet. She said 10 minutes will tell me more than standing in here.

Will Decker said Silas? I heard her. Silas said if Puit came to the tree line with four men in vehicles, he said stand down. Ria said.

He said they're staying in the trees. A man with four men in the trees who tells you he's calling them off is still a man with four men in the trees. Decker said. Yes, she said.

And a man who drove to a lit building with four men when he could have sent the same message through Massen or through a lawyer or through another unknown number call is a man who decided that in person was safer. That means something. Rex turned the wrench over in his hand once. "It means he doesn't trust his own people," Rex said, flat, factual.

The most precise thing said in the room so far, everyone absorbed that. Silas said, "Call him back. Tell him to come to the front of the building alone, hands visible." Daniel Puit was 61 years old and looked his age without apology. Gray at the temples, lines in his face that were the topographic record of decisions made under pressure across decades, a frame that had been broad once and was still carrying the structure of it beneath a quilted vest and a flannel shirt that was not what you wore when you were trying to project authority. He walked out of the dark and into the flood of the overhead lights with his hands at his sides and his palms forward, and he stopped 10 ft from the bay door and looked at Silas.

Silas looked back at him. 40 years of history in that look, maybe more. Ria stood to Silas's left and slightly back, and she watched the two men take the measure of each other in the particular silence of people who had been connected through someone they both loved and had never been in the same room. "Daniel," Silas said.

One word. No temperature in it either direction, just acknowledgement, the sound of someone confirming that a thing exists. I'm going to say this fast because I don't have much runway. Puit said the envelope, the photographs, the note, that was massen operating independently.

He's been running a side pressure campaign that Harrow's principals don't know about and would shut down immediately if they did because it creates criminal exposure that poisons the property acquisitions. He paused. I found out 2 days ago. I've spent two days trying to decide what to do about it.

And you decided to come here. Silas said. I decided to come here. Puit said.

Why? Puit looked at Ria briefly, then back to Silas. Because May called me tonight, he said. She called me because you finally called her and she told me what you told her.

And then she said he stopped. He looked at his hands for a moment, the gesture of a man doing something unfamiliar with his composure. She said that whatever I'd gotten myself into with Harrow, I needed to find a way out that didn't cost anyone else what it had already cost her. The bay was quiet, except for the heater and the distant sound of Eleanor's television.

What did it cost her? Ria said. Puit looked at her. Four years of a marriage that was already over, he said.

Puit Capital was my retirement vehicle. I structured it through a real estate holding on advice from a financial planner who turned out to be connected to Harrow's acquisition team. I didn't know what the underlying land strategy was when I invested. By the time I understood what I was in, I was in it deeply enough that extracting myself was he stopped.

I told myself it was passive. I told myself I wasn't the one making decisions about which properties went through assessment. I told myself a lot of things and the divorce. Silas said May found a document.

Puit said in the house before we separated, a transfer document for the Harmon property. She knew the Harmons. She grew up 2 miles from them. He looked at Silas.