On the water, in the dark, with my family finally out of the immediate reach of harm, Lucas told me the rest of it, quietly, the whole story he had meant to tell me after the reception.

He had become a public defender, he said, for the very reason my father despised: because he had watched a system take everything from his family and grind them down with paperwork, and he had decided, at nineteen, standing in the emptied rooms of the house they lost, that he was going to spend his life being the person who stood on the other side of that, for the people who had no one.

It was not a failure of ambition, the way my father saw it.

It was the most ambitious thing a person could do.

He wanted to hold a line against the entire weight of the powerful, on behalf of the people they were used to crushing without consequence, and he had done it, case by case, year after year, for almost no money and no glory, and had asked for nothing back.

And somewhere along that road, the veterans had found him — men and women the system had discarded, whistleblowers the powerful had tried to bury, families the foundation had denied — and he had taken their cases when no one else would touch them, and won some, and lost some, and never once let go.