I watched their faces move through it in stages, the way you’d watch weather come across a valley: first blank incomprehension, then shock, then fear as the size of what they’d done began to reach them — and then, underneath all of it, surfacing last and ugliest, something greedy, a fast recalculation of what might still be gotten.

That last look was the one that told me I was doing the right thing, finally, six years late.

It’s worth sitting on that last look for a moment, because it’s the whole story of them in a single expression.

A person who loved me, confronted with the news that I’d secretly bought a mansion, might have felt a hundred things — betrayal at the secret, hurt at being shut out, even a rueful admiration.

What crossed Dashiell’s face, once the shock burned off, was none of those.

It was arithmetic. I could see him doing it in real time, standing barefoot on the hot asphalt: recalculating, in the space of two seconds, how a house he hadn’t known existed might still be pried partly loose, what a lawyer might argue, what half of it would be worth.