But for two years, at the very end, he had been my friend, my true and daily friend, and he had given me the only companionship of my old age, and he had made certain, through the one instrument the law allowed him, that I would never be cold or forgotten or alone again.

And in the doing of it, in the chess and the tea and the sunsets and the careful, cowardly, loving deception of it all, he had done the thing he set out to do, the thing that took him forty-five years and seventy-four million dollars and the whole of his failing strength to accomplish.

In the end, he had brought his daughter home.

I looked up at the sky as the sun dipped beneath the horizon, casting brilliant streaks of gold and violet across the clouds, the same colors we had watched together, side by side, for two years, from this very balcony.