A lesser man — a more frightened man — would have taken that betrayal and let it wall him off, would have spent his last decades suspicious of every handshake, auditing his own children, treating love as a liability to be hedged.

My father did the opposite.

He built the trust precisely so that he would never again have to choose between loving his family and protecting his legacy — so that the two could stop being in tension, so that he could go on being the open-handed man he had always been without that openness ever again becoming a door someone could pick.

“I’m not going to stop trusting people, Delphine,” he said, capping his pen.

“I’m just going to stop making it easy for the ones who’d abuse it.

There’s a difference.