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My jacket hung over the back of the chair beside me, and I’d loosened my tie sometime after five. Dad hadn’t. His sleeves were rolled once at the forearms, but the knot at his throat remained centered, as though a properly tied Windsor might reassure the market if nothing else did.

What worried me more was the Scotch beside his hand.

He hadn’t touched it.

“How bad is it?” I asked.

He kept looking at the yellow legal pad in front of him. “Sit down.”

“I’m supposed to call Lorrie.”

I hadn’t actually told her I’d call, but I’d been thinking about her all afternoon.

He frowned as he pushed the legal pad across the desk. “This is more important.”

At first, the figures looked like the same kind of mess I’d been seeing all month. Positions marked in red, loans coming due, numbers rewritten in the margins, percentages circled twice. I recognized several of the accounts and understood enough to know that some of the cushions Dad had assured me were there had become considerably thinner, but then again I was still learning the larger side of the brokerage, which was supposedly why he wanted me spending more time in Cleveland after Labor Day.

I picked up the pad and ran my finger down one column.

“What happened to Fairmont?”

“They reduced the line.”

“By half?”

“They became nervous.”

My father leaned back. “Banks become nervous when people ask them for money. It’s one of their less useful characteristics.”

Normally I might have smiled, because that was the kind of thing he said when he wanted everyone else to believe a problem was beneath him.

Tonight I kept reading. There were figures beside three client accounts I knew, followed by arrows that pointed toward a holding account I didn’t recognize.

“What’s this?”

“A temporary transfer.”

“From client accounts?”

“From available cash positions.”

I looked up. “That isn’t what I asked.”

His expression changed slightly, more irritation than guilt, which somehow made me feel worse.

I put the legal pad back on his desk.

“Were those funds authorized to move?”

“They remain within the firm.”

“That still isn’t an answer.”

My father finally stood and walked to the credenza, where he picked up the Scotch he’d been ignoring. He was still a broad man, heavier through the shoulders than I was, with dark hair turning silver at the temples and the kind of confidence that had made me believe, when I was a kid, that there wasn’t a problem he couldn’t fix if given a telephone and ten minutes.

At twenty-five, I’d begun to understand that confidence and certainty weren’t always the same thing.

“We’re managing short-term liquidity,” he said.