“You can’t do this!” Julian yelled, his voice cracking, climbing into a pathetic, desperate squeak.

“I built that firm!

Half of that is mine!

That’s my inheritance!”

“Your inheritance,” Arthur replied, flatly, without a flicker of hesitation, “now belongs in an irrevocable trust.

For my grandchild.”

He let that settle, and then he added the sentence that finished it, quiet and absolute.

“The child,” he said, “that you told Nora to exercise, in the freezing cold.” And there was a terrible justice in it that even Julian could not argue against, because the very act by which he had tried to destroy the child had become the act by which the child inherited everything he had.