“All right,” he said.

“I’m listening.

Tell me.” And there was something in the way he said it, some instant and total attention, that told me the nine years had not changed one essential fact about my brother: that underneath the sharpness, underneath the deals and the armor, Arthur was a man who, when someone he loved genuinely needed him, dropped everything.

It was one of the things I had lost sight of during the feud, when he had become in my mind only the adversary, the corporate machine, the man who chose the business over his brother.

But that had never been the whole of him, and I heard the rest of him now in three words on a phone line, the older and truer Arthur, the brother I had actually grown up with, saying I’m listening in a voice that meant it.