The judge authorized emergency freezes on the flagged accounts. I looked at the gold-embossed invitation propped on my counter, and I understood that my family had staged, at considerable expense, their own undoing, and had mailed me a ticket to it.

Chapter 14 — The Toast

The following evening, in a ballroom full of more than a hundred guests, under chandeliers, among people in their good clothes, my mother pressed a glass of champagne into my hand and asked me, beaming, to say a few words — to raise a toast, she said, to our family’s perfect unity.

It was, I thought, taking the glass, an almost unbelievable gift.

She was handing me the microphone.

I stepped up to it.