“You did that yourself.

Every dollar of it.

I just kept the receipts.”

That line of my father’s — I have learned, too late, how many of us there are — was the one I would come back to more than any other, long after the trial was over.

He had spent his whole life a proud and private man, the sort who would have been mortified to be thought a victim of anything, let alone of his own son.

And in that recording, dying, he had chosen to name himself plainly as one of a great and mostly invisible multitude: the old people quietly robbed by the very families entrusted to care for them, each of them believing, as he had nearly believed, that they were alone and somehow at fault.