It is the exact same failure, I’ve come to think, that let him hurt our father: the total inability to grant another person a real interior life, real stakes, a reality equal to his own.

He could not see our father as a person and so he could rob him.

He could not see me as a prosecutor and so he robbed our father in front of one.

The same blindness did both.

And it was that blindness, in the end, and not any cleverness of mine, that undid him — a man so walled inside himself that he committed a felony across the breakfast table from the one person on earth most equipped to prove it, and never even knew to be afraid.

“I’ll head out this afternoon,” I said mildly, and my father’s fork trembled against his plate, and Julian looked delighted, and I smiled into my coffee.