Arthur Thorne, who had built a millwork business out of nothing and sold it at seventy-eight because his son could not run it, sat in an office in Denver in 1994 and worked out that the person holding the child and the person holding the money must not be the same person.

He put it in writing in two lines.

Which means that on the tenth of June 2006 my mother had a choice of exactly two things.

She could raise her grandson and resign as trustee and lose twenty-eight thousand eight hundred dollars a year.

Or she could find somebody else to raise him.

Imogen Sarkissian read me paragraph fourteen out loud in her office in Denver in the January of 2025, and then she put the paper down and said:

“Mr.