It was not merely where Henry kept his papers.

It was where he had lived his inner life for forty-six years, where he read in the evenings, where he did his crosswords, where he and I had sat across from each other on a thousand quiet nights, each with our own work, comfortable in the same silence.

After he died, that room became the last place he still felt present to me, the one square of the world where I could still almost believe he had only stepped out and would be back.

For Michael to go into that room, to open those drawers, to rifle through his dead father’s most private things in search of weapons to use against his living mother, was not just theft.