The voicemail picked up mid-fourth ring.
Ryan hung up without leaving one.
He sat with the phone in his hand for a moment, looking at her contact. Diana Lockridge. He'd saved it the night of the gallery with the optimism of someone who didn't yet know whether saving it would mean anything.
Now it meant something, and she hadn't answered, and this was the kind of conversation that couldn't be left in a voicemail.
He put the phone on the couch and went to the living room.
The whiteboard was still there, leaning against the wall where it had been since the team meeting — the circle with the question mark, mostly erased now, ghost marks of it still visible in the white. He pulled it fully upright, found the marker on the floor beside it, uncapped it.
And he started thinking out loud onto the board.
---
The first thing he needed to understand was what the money actually looked like from the outside.
