They circled the house like people waiting outside a shop before a sale, and they spoke of his money, his companies, his estate, in the very rooms where he still sat breathing.

I would carry a tray past a half-open door and hear them, Julian’s smooth angry voice, Victoria’s sharp one, dividing up a life that was still being lived.

They spoke of their father the way you might speak of a bank vault whose combination you were waiting to inherit.

I do not think either of them, in all those months, ever once asked how he was feeling.

That was the detail that struck me most, working in that house, because I have spent my whole life among the sick and the dying, and I know what it looks like when the people around a fading person love them, and what it looks like when they do not.