I said something gentle and useless, the kind of thing you say, and he nodded once and walked on.

I did not know yet that this quiet, formal, dying man was about to change the whole course of my life and my son’s.

Chapter 3 — A House at War

In the months that followed, working in that grand and echoing house, I came to understand why the staff went so quiet around Arthur, and why a man surrounded by that much wealth wore the loneliest face I had ever seen.

His two adult children, Julian and Victoria, were at war over his fortune, and the terrible thing was that Arthur was not yet dead.