Uncle Clive came to me some weeks later and apologized — sincerely, I think — for the things he had said in the church.

I accepted his apology.

I did not, however, restore him to the inner rooms of my life, and I felt no guilt about that.

Grief had taught me something I had been slow to learn: that forgiveness and access are two different things, and that you can wish a person well from the other side of a door you have every right to keep closed.

Chapter 17 — The Fund

A year after the funeral, I turned my father’s study — the room where he had shown his son what he was, the room where the safe still stood in the corner — into the headquarters of the Hugh Grahame Elder Justice Fund.