The breath went out of me. “Three years? Why didn’t you stop them? You could have locked the accounts the day the first dollar moved. You could have confronted Dad on day one.”

He turned his head slowly. The frailty was simply gone — not fading, gone — and what sat in the chair was the mind of a man who had built an empire out of nothing and stepped over anyone who stood in the road.

“If I had stopped your father three years ago, Avery, what would have happened?” His voice was low and level and had no warmth in it at all. “He would have cried.

Your mother would have produced a dozen excuses. A misunderstanding. A lapse in judgment. A hard year. I’d have revoked his power of attorney, and our miserable family would have gone on exactly as it was.”

“Yes,” I said. “And you’d have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“And when I died,” he went on, leaning forward, firelight cutting hard shadows up his face, “they would have contested the will. They’d have dragged my estate through probate for a decade and bled it dry in legal fees, and they would have taken it in the end, because they had nothing else to do with their lives and I would have been unavailable for comment.”