Chapter 23: Marcus Pays Off Nadia's Loans

The law firm was called Meridian Charitable Services, LLC, and it occupied the fourth floor of a building on Lomas Boulevard that Marcus had driven past approximately eight hundred times without ever looking up. Reyes sent him the name in a text message that arrived while he was writing a quiz on reaction kinetics, three questions long, designed to take twenty minutes and identify which seven students were still confusing rate constants with equilibrium constants. He finished writing question three before he read the message. This was not discipline. It was just sequence.

He called the number that evening from the parking lot of a Walgreens two miles from his house, standing outside his truck because he had decided, without fully examining the decision, that certain calls should not be made from inside a vehicle registered to his name. The attorney who answered was a woman named Castellano, and she spoke in the measured cadences of someone who had conducted this category of conversation many times and had long since stopped attaching moral valence to it. Anonymous philanthropic transfers. Donor-advised structures. She asked him the name of the recipient's loan servicer, the account number if available, and the intended disbursement amount.

Marcus had both figures memorized. He had memorized them eleven months ago, the same week he had memorized Dr. Patel's folder.