He had, in his history, whatever it was that made veterans step aside at parades.

He had every provocation a man could have — his daughter’s bruised throat, his granddaughter threatened, three years of cruelty laid bare in front of him — and he had, clearly, the capacity to answer all of it in a language Gerald Beaumont understood in his bones.

And Gerald, offering fifty million dollars from the floor, was in that moment begging my father to use it — begging, really, to be dealt with in the old way, the private way, the way that ends in a settlement and a silence and no record, because that was the only kind of ending Gerald knew how to survive.

A man like Gerald can buy his way out of the law.