My father had been approving those guarantees, and unauthorized loans besides, without a word to any board, treating the company’s accounts as a private tap.

Laid out end to end, the drive exposed nearly one point eight million dollars of it.

“They believed,” Mr.

Wright said quietly, “that your grandfather was too old and too sick, at the end, to notice what was happening around him.”

And I remembered.

I remembered the last months of Grandpa’s life, when the whole family had taken to speaking of him, gently, pityingly, as confused.