He kept trying to find out the exact total.

How much your father had left me.” “And you told him?” “I told him it was for my old age.

My care.

Nothing else.” She hesitated.

“And he said — he said if I was going to live in his apartment long-term, it was only fair I put a large part of my savings toward his property costs.” And then the last piece: a week before he hit her, Brandon had asked my mother, directly, for a sixty-thousand-dollar loan to prop up Lucas’s failing business, and when she gently declined, he had accused her of being ungrateful for his hospitality.

Claire and I looked at each other across that small hotel room, and neither of us had to say it, but she said it anyway, because that is what good lawyers do — they make the unbearable thing explicit so it can’t hide.