Everything else — and there had been a real amount of everything else, a good career and a paid-off house — had gone into three and a half years of litigation against his mother’s trust, and then a failed appeal, and then, once the money was mostly gone, into a slow arrangement with a man on the telephone.

Thirty-one thousand dollars over fourteen months, in gift cards and wire transfers, to someone who called himself an account security specialist and who my father, in a notebook we found later, referred to as Doug.

He had written down every conversation. Dates, times, amounts, what Doug said. Careful, orderly, a lifetime of professional habit applied to being robbed.

There is a version of me who would have found that satisfying. I want to be honest and say that I looked for her, and she wasn’t there.

Cottonwood Ridge is in Lakewood and costs nine thousand four hundred dollars a month.

I pay it.