Make sure he’s comfortable, take it slow, tell him he’s safe.” “You can’t go up there!” Julian lunged to block the stairs.

“This is my house!

I have power of attorney!” I stood then.

I stood up from that table and I walked into the entryway and I said the sentence I had been waiting nine years, without knowing it, to say to my own brother.

“You have a forged power of attorney.”

There is a moment, in every one of these, when the person who has run the household through fear finally meets a person they cannot frighten, and watching it happen is one of the few genuinely satisfying things in my line of work.

Julian had spent months being the largest, most dangerous presence in every room he entered — to my father, certainly, a frightened old man, but I suspect to Chloe too, and to himself.