And there was a practical wisdom in it, too, that Miriam had understood from the first phone call and that I only came to see later.

A man like my father does not truly suffer from being shouted at; it feeds him, gives him an enemy, lets him recast himself as the wronged party rather than the guilty one.

The one thing he could not survive, could not spin, could not shout his way out of, was to be handed, without heat, the plain consequences of his own documented choices — to be defeated by facts so quietly and so completely that there was no drama left for him to hide inside.

He wanted a war with his ungrateful daughter.