It wore my mother down to almost nothing.

It worked on me, for twenty-six years.

It worked on a board of directors full of grown men who should have known better.

Declan was the only person I ever watched simply decline to play the game — not by shouting back, which my father would have understood and enjoyed, but by going quiet, gathering facts, and letting the loud man exhaust himself against a wall of things that were simply, verifiably so.

I thought, for years, that Declan was being passive.