“Definitely criminal,” he said.

I had watched that video alone the night before, in the dark, and I need to tell you it was the hardest thing in the whole ordeal — harder than the funeral, harder than the will.

Everything else my father had done, I had encountered as paper: a forged signature, a transferred deed, a number moved from one column to another.

Paper keeps you at a distance.

But the video was not paper.

The video was my grandfather’s actual body, helpless in a bed, and my father’s actual hands closing around it, using the very helplessness I had spent six months tending as a tool, a convenience, a way to move a pen.