I was sitting in a deep armchair by the window, wrapped in a soft cashmere sweater someone had brought me, holding my son and my daughter against my chest, one in the crook of each arm.

And arranged around me, unhurried, was the plain visual grammar of everything that had changed: two of the trust’s corporate attorneys, four hospital security officers, and the hospital’s own Chief of Medicine, all of them there for me.

Flynn’s eyes went from the babies, to my face, to the neat stack of legal documents on the low table between us, and I watched him do the arithmetic and arrive, finally, at the total.

There is a specific expression a certain kind of powerful man wears in the instant he understands that his power is gone, and I had never seen it before that morning and have never forgotten it since.