I set my grandfather’s mahogany box down on the nearest cocktail table, among the abandoned champagne flutes, and I looked at my sister.

“That,” I said, “is exactly what you said about this box, on Christmas morning.

You keep using that word for things you don’t want to be true.

It doesn’t make them impossible, Savannah.

It only makes you unprepared.”

My father was flipping through the documents now, faster and faster, and I watched his face travel, in real time, through a sequence of stages I will never forget: blank disbelief first, and then, as the legal language sank in, a flare of genuine fear, and then — last, and ugliest — a narrow, darting look of calculation, a man already searching the wreckage for an angle.