He curled up in his favorite easy chair and sat quietly with a glass of orange juice, gazing through the sliding glass doors. Little by little daylight overtook the night. He hoped Carolyn would sleep in a bit, not only to spare her a few moments of pain but to give him a little time to sit alone and consider the jumble of facts that were plaguing him.

He was an architect by training, and so his initial instinct was to evaluate a project and try to figure out how it all fit together. A magnificent bridge was worthless if it couldn’t support the weight it was intended to carry. As a child, he would spend hours building a structure out of blocks, and then slowly add more and more blocks, one at a time, until it inevitably came crumbling down, determining the load-bearing weight. Everything had a breaking point, a threshold. It was just a matter of how much weight or pressure was applied, and eventually it would collapse. So he looked at yesterday’s revelations in much the same way, and was utterly confused. This felt more like a massive collision than a trickle, but what did he really know? And why hadn’t he seen it coming? Had he just been too preoccupied with his own life to notice anything? With something so monumental brewing, how could he have been so unaware?

He prided himself on being observant. He paid attention to the little things because they were often indicators of major issues lurking just below the surface. These habits showed up in the way he raised his children and managed people, and in his keen ability to read the body language of a client or, more importantly, smell that a junior architect might have cut corners or been a little sloppy. Buildings needed to survive all eventualities, not most eventualities. When they didn’t, disasters could occur—not the time to discover a structural problem. So Mitch generally followed his sniffer and, if something was amiss, he usually uncovered it.

The more Danny’s actions sank in, the more confused he became. There were dozens of unanswered questions. He presumed he would get some clarity later today when they met at Tom Schroeder’s house, but he just couldn’t push away the image of Danny shooting and killing his wife and child. It was just too horrible to contemplate.