After a moment, Ángel said, “He’s paying ten million dollars for company? Is he angry? Will he— Is he going to punish me for what my father did?”

Victor scoffed. “Now you are being absurd. The envoy is a man of honor.”

“Perfect target for a thief, then, no?” flashed Ángel at him. “Absurd was you trying to rip him off. And now you want me to save your ass.”

Agent Jeremy said blandly, “Six years is less than half the minimum prison sentence your father could expect for fraud.”

“I’m not the one who committed fraud,” said Ángel, standing up.

“Ángel,” said his mother. “Please sit.”

He looked at her. Abigail Barrington had married a short Cubano electrician in a burst of adolescent rebellion, and then, thinking better of it, had divorced him and moved back to Savannah, leaving her son behind. She looked out of place here in her ex-husband’s Jacksonville home—pale and blond and slim.

He sat.

He’d spent summers with her other family in Georgia, where he’d always felt, at best, like a guest; at worst, an embarrassing reminder of an episode everyone would prefer to forget. But he did remember happy times too. She had taught him to dance in the dining room of her house. They’d pushed the table and chairs up against the wall and turned up the radio to waltz to “She’s Always a Woman” by Billy Joel. She’d laughed as they danced.

She wasn’t laughing now. “No matter what you do, your father is going bankrupt. His business is gone. He’s going to lose this house, and his retirement account, and the money he put aside for you. He’ll be publicly disgraced before all his friends. He’ll lose friends, the people who trusted him.”

This was horrifying. In spite of himself, pity for his father rose up in his throat. He still couldn’t believe that Victor would ever do this—his father wouldn’t know how to contact the envoy from the Otherworld.

But he bet his wheeler-dealer stepfather would. “Did you know?” he asked. “Were you in on it too?”

“But if you step in,” she went on, not answering him, “that’s where the damage stops. Your father won’t go to prison. They won’t come after my family, or your brothers. Ned won’t lose his home, Michael will be able to stay in school—he’ll need to get loans, but he’ll be able to do it. Think of Ned and Michael. Think about Ned’s children.”

“You did know.” He stared at his mother. “I bet it was Bill’s thing all along, wasn’t it?”

“That doesn’t matter now.”