He helped his father defraud his own mother.

Those are not public-relations problems.

They are facts, and facts do not reconcile, and no meeting in the world amends them.

Luca wanted to renegotiate his place in the story.

He never understood that the story was simply true, and that the truth, unlike his family’s fortune, was one thing he had never had the power to control.

Chapter 19 — What They Forgot

When Luca and his father cornered Patricia and me in that penthouse — one of them with a raised hand, the other with a lifetime of financial leverage — they were operating on an assumption so old and so common that they never thought to examine it.