The brownstone itself was gone, but with the recovered money I started a foundation for daughters of service members facing estate fraud and family coercion, and I named it after my grandmother — the Melisande Foundation.

I understood, better than most, why it was needed.

There is a particular vulnerability to being deployed: you are away, unreachable, unable to walk into a registry office or a bank or a courtroom, and there are people who wait for exactly that season to move against you.

The women who came to the foundation had my mother’s crime committed against them in a dozen variations — a signature forged while they were overseas, a parent’s trust quietly drained, a home sold out from under a name that was still legally on the deed.

What the foundation gave them was not sympathy, which is cheap, but the thing my father had given me: a record, and a lawyer, and someone in the room who would not be talked out of the truth.