His sister, he wrote, had pressured him relentlessly during his final months — pressing him, when he was weakest, to name her as the trustee over our estate, to give her authority over our affairs and, through them, over me.

He had refused.

And he had understood, knowing her as only a brother of seven decades could, exactly what she would do the moment he was in the ground.

He had watched his sister for seven decades, after all.

He had seen, forty years before, what she would do for money when she thought no one was looking, and he had never once let himself forget it, even as he covered for her and kept her secret and treated her, in public, as the beloved sister she pretended to be.

So when he fell ill, and she began appearing at the house with her casseroles and her questions, Lawrence had not been fooled for a single day.