He was right.

In the end, the galas and the good name and the beautiful public story counted for nothing, because a dead man had left behind a ledger, and the ledger remembered.

I want to dwell on that reckoning for a moment, because there is a justice in it that runs deeper than the particular case of the Abernathys, and that I have found strangely consoling ever since.

The Abernathys had spent enormous effort, over decades, building the intangible thing they valued above all else: reputation.