“Oh, come on. We made that up? He was an emotional whipsaw! Yelling one minute, crying the next, then he’d go all stoic for days—”

“I know, I was there too.”

I can feel my anger coiling up, waiting for a chance to be unleashed. It’s part of the old pattern of behavior I fall into with Ethan. But that’s not why I’m here. “Hold on,” I say, hand raised and palm out, as if telling my emotions to stop. “What does this Finn guy want? He didn’t show up out of the blue to talk about Dad for no reason. What does he want?”

Ethan leans back, deflated. “He thinks Dad moved all the money they stole. And Finn doesn’t know where it is.”

My heart sinks. “And he wants his share,” I say. Ethan nods. “What kind of money is he talking about?”

Someone says, “Big pallets of cash.”

Ethan and I turn to stare at Tane, who’s standing at the other end of the living room, drying his curly reddish-brown hair with a towel. He’s wearing gym shorts and a faded Archer School football T-shirt of Ethan’s.

“How long have you been standing there?” I ask. I’m annoyed that I didn’t hear him turn off the shower or come down the hall.

Tane shrugs. “Long enough, I guess.”

Wilson scampers over to Tane and drops his rope bone at Tane’s feet, then looks up, tail wagging. Tane kicks the rope bone across the floor and Wilson chases it under a side table next to where Ethan sits.

“What big pallets of cash?” Ethan asks.

Tane drapes his towel around his neck. “The U.S. government flew in big pallets of cash to try and stabilize things after they invaded Iraq,” he says. “Largest transfer of cash in history.”

An uneasy feeling builds inside me, like someone just struck a tiny tuning fork in my chest. “How much cash?”

Tane shrugs again. “Billions. Maybe forty billion.”

Nobody says anything for a moment. Even Wilson stops gnawing on his rope bone.

I clear my throat. “Forty billion dollars?”

“Maybe,” Tane says. “Nobody knows for certain.”

“What do you mean nobody knows for certain?”

Ethan reaches down to scratch behind Wilson’s ears. “I read about this,” he says. “It was Iraqi money, right?”

Tane nods. “Financial assets of Saddam Hussein’s that the U.S. froze. It was supposed to be used to rebuild the country. All carefully counted and accounted for on our end. And then they flew all that cash to Baghdad and a bunch of it just disappeared.”

“And nobody cared?” I ask. I’m still trying to imagine losing track of billions of dollars.