All of it, tonight, before you sleep.” There was a pause on the line.

Michelle had worked with me for fifteen years, and she did not spook easily, and she did not ask unnecessary questions.

But she asked one now.

“You think he’s compromised?” I considered how to answer that, standing in the corridor with the muffled sound of my son’s wedding coming through the wall.

“I think,” I said, “that he’s forgotten who owns the table he’s eating at.” She said she would take care of it.

And I stood in that corridor a moment longer than I needed to, because there is a specific grief in giving an instruction like that about your own child — in speaking of your son to your lawyer in the same flat, careful voice you would use about an opposing party.