“Oh, God,” I whisper, grabbing for the back of a chair to help support me. The information is coming so fast, I’m struggling to wrap my head around it. But the words that keep singing to me are the words that are written on paper before me.

“When you mentioned Talebi,” Lander says, clearly emboldened by my reaction, “it became clear that you were up to something, and at first I suspected that you were working with Travis. So I did two things. First I made sure that Travis overheard my end of a phone conversation between me and Talebi.” From my peripheral vision I can see him make air-quotes around the word overheard. “I faked the call, of course, but Travis didn’t know that. I made sure Travis thought that Talebi was someone who could be a threat to him, but I was extraordinarily vague about the particulars. Like he was someone who could make my brother look bad in the press or dig up some actual insider trading stuff. I had to make sure that you and Travis were looking in the wrong direction.”

My eyes keep reading and rereading the solution to the anagram, my mind furiously going over all the things it could mean. The picture would suggest that he wants retribution against his family. Of course he could have planted this for me. He could be using this as a way to trick me again, to convince me that he’s on my side.

But then, I found this sketch on the first night he took me home. Before he could possibly have known what I was up to. And I found it with the anagram about Nick Foley. If it was a plant, why allow me to find that too?

“You said you did two things,” I say hoarsely.

“Yes, the second thing I did was hire private investigators. I hired a slew of them, actually, and I promised an impressive bonus to whoever could figure out your identity first. The first one I hired found virtually nothing. The second one found even less. You’ve covered your tracks well. But the third detective, a man who used to work for the intelligence community as a sort of government-sanctioned hacker, he found enough for me to put the rest of the pieces together myself.”

“And when was that?” I ask. True retribution, true retribution, true retribution—the words are marching around in my head like a chant. Like the revelation it is.

“That was this morning, Adoncia.”

I inhale sharply. True retribution.