Last month my granddaughter turned eighteen, and Henry’s trust paid her first college tuition bill, and she came to see me afterward carrying a small bakery cake, and we sat in my garden until the sun went down, and she asked me not about the money but about her grandfather, what he was really like, and I laughed and told her he cheated at Scrabble, constantly, shamelessly, and we talked until the porch light came on, and I watched her face in the fading light, my granddaughter, so much of Henry in the shape of her smile, and I thought about how close all of this had come to being lost to her.

If Michael had won, she would have grown up believing a false story about her grandmother, the confused old woman who had to be managed.

She would have inherited her father’s version of me, and of Henry, and of what our family had been.

Instead she sat in my garden asking me who her grandfather really was, wanting the true man and not the useful myth, and I got to give her the truth, the whole warm ordinary truth of him.

That, more than the money, more than the verdict, was what I had actually won in that courtroom.