The first thing I hung on the wall was that photograph from beside the coffin: my father at the lake, laughing, in the years before illness and betrayal hollowed his face.

Below it we did the work.

Lawyers came through those doors, and investigators, and, most of all, frightened families — old people who had been quietly robbed by the children and nephews and caretakers who were supposed to love them, and who had been told, as my father nearly was, that it would be easier and kinder to keep it in the family and say nothing.

We told them otherwise.

In the fund’s first year alone, using the same patient, unglamorous work my brother had once called spreadsheet babysitting, we traced and recovered millions of dollars for people who had been made to feel foolish for trusting their own families.

The house was quiet again.