He’s had his lawyers restrict my access to our newborns in the NICU.

And he thinks he’s walked away clean.”

There was a silence on the line, and then the crisp, unmistakable sound of Maren opening a heavy legal binder — the sound, I would think later, of a decade-old promise being taken down off a shelf.

Maren had drafted the clause herself, ten years before, as a young associate at my grandfather’s instruction, and she had told me once that she’d assumed for a decade it would molder in a drawer unused — that it was the legal equivalent of a smoke detector in a house that never burns.

She had checked its language every single year regardless, quietly, on her own time, keeping it current against changes in the law, because my grandfather had asked her to and because she had loved him too.