He read the whole twenty-two pages, which took him about twenty minutes, with his spectacles down his nose.

And then he told me three things, and I heard two of them.

One. The guardianship was clean and in order and Jolene’s surrender was properly executed and nobody was coming to take Silas away from me.

Two. The waiver clause, the one I had agonized over on the hood of a truck, was theatre.

It said I released any claim to the estate of Agnes and Thaddeus Thorne.

And Frank said, “Roland, you never had one.