No, you could get interested in the Coster scandal even if you don’t know what “futures” are, even if you’ve never heard of “blue chip” stocks, even if your financial experience is limited to balancing your own checkbook.

You could get interested because of Reid Sutherland.

His name is everywhere, and not just on my phone.

Meg, his first voice mail had said. Please, call me.

Meg, said the second, his voice quieter, more strained. Something unexpected has happened. If you could call me, before you look at the news today.

The third hadn’t bothered with my name. Reid spoke quickly, almost in desperation. I may not have access to my phone for some time, he’d said, as though he was seconds away from this particular fate, as though he was holding up a finger to someone trying to take it from him. But I will explain this to you. I promise—that’s three promises, now—I will explain it.

His texts had been more of the same—desperate in tone, but pointedly vague, revealing nothing more than his hope to speak with me, his concern over my seeing the news, his warning that he might be unreachable.

And because he is, in fact, unreachable—my hands shake each time I try to get ahold of him—I have to rely on the other places where I can find his name.

In the initial stories—the ones I missed when the news was breaking—Reid Sutherland is little more than a principled drone, a Coster employee who noticed something suspicious and quietly reported it. In those stories, Reid’s name is small, easy to scroll past if you were so inclined. It’s embedded—in tiny, unremarkable, roman fonts—in long columns of impenetrable detail about Coster and his scheme. Unless you knew him—unless your heart was pounding in shock and confusion for yourself and worry and fear for him—you might forget Reid Sutherland’s name altogether.

But as the story unfolds, you can see the letters stretch to fit him; you can see the moment the press learned that he was more to Coster than an employee. One sub-headline teases it in bold, brutal type:

Whistleblower Sutherland Almost Married into Coster Family

After that, Reid is everywhere, an unforgettable part of the scandal, packaged for easy consumption by a media machine looking for a more click-worthy angle than the incomprehensible numbers. A one-time child prodigy who kept himself separate from his coworkers, most of whom thought him stern, humorless, distant. A brilliant analyst who’d risen in the ranks quickly, eventually spending eleven surprising months (some coworkers had taken bets on how long it would last) engaged to Alistair Coster’s socialite daughter, until a quiet, seemingly amicable breakup not long before the wedding. A nerves-of-steel hero who spent the last six months working with authorities, never betraying even a hint of disruption to his regular work.