And the great looming figure of my childhood, the man who filled every room, simply deflated — not because he had grown weaker, but because the thing that had made him strong had never been inside him at all.

It had been in us, in our fear and our love and our willingness to keep quiet, and the moment we took it back, there was almost nothing left standing where the patriarch had been.

Just a frightened older man in an emptying house, alone at last with what he had actually done.

Chapter 18 — A Lifetime of Work

The financial reckoning came quickly after that.

Arthur Vance, who turned out to be a fairer man than my father deserved, agreed to hold off on criminal fraud charges in exchange for an ironclad civil confession of debt and the immediate return of his sixty thousand dollars.