That was the last real difference between us, laid bare in a sentence: I was letting go of a marriage, and he thought I was being difficult about dessert.

“All right,” I said.

“Enjoy the cake.”

And I hung up, and I stood there in the doorway with the nurse and her wheelchair, and I made the one call I had spent nearly two years avoiding.

Chapter 3 — The Call I’d Been Avoiding

“Dad,” I said, when he answered.

He heard exactly one breath of mine, and he said, “Where are you?”

Twenty minutes later, Augustus Ellsworth walked into that hospital in an old gray coat, with no driver, no assistant, no entourage — nothing about him to suggest that the financial pages ran his photograph beside words like founder and chairman and, when they were feeling dramatic, billionaire. Just a man in a worn coat, moving faster than a man his age should, looking for his daughter.