I looked up from the page, my throat tight, and started to protest, and she stopped me with a look.

I understood, later, exactly what she was doing with that directive, and it was not sentiment, or reward, though it was partly both.

It was the last move in the same clear-eyed defense she had been conducting since the lobby.

My grandmother had learned, in the hardest possible way, that a fortune left carelessly is a fortune that draws predators, and that the ordinary assumption, leave it to your children, had nearly cost her everything while she still lived.

So she was doing, with her estate, the thing my grandfather had done with the deed and she had done with the power of attorney’s revocation: putting protections in place that would hold after she could no longer defend them herself.