At two o’clock I have a Mrs.

Gable coming in, a retired schoolteacher whose nephew talked her into signing away her cottage while she was groggy from knee surgery, telling her it was a Medicare form.

We will have an emergency stay drafted before she leaves.

My assistant, Sarah, came up a little while ago with the morning’s mail and the quarterly audit from Raymond Steadman’s office, and she set it down and told me, in the quiet pleased way she has, that every dollar of the trust was accounted for and the center’s endowment was funded for years out, even after opening the new legal-aid branch in the city.

I thanked her, and I meant it, and after she went back downstairs I sat for a moment with the folder in my lap and thought about how strange and right it was — that the money my father had bled out of a dying man one forged signature at a time was now a machine that ran in the other direction, that caught people instead of stripping them, that turned back the exact crime it had been born from.

That is what my grandfather’s money does now, every single day.