I had made a telephone call, the evening after my mother’s revelation, to my father’s lifelong attorney, a man named Hollis Crane who had handled the family’s private affairs for forty years.

I told him what my mother had told me.

There was a long silence on the line, and then he said, in the careful voice of a man who has been waiting a long time for an unwelcome call, that there were things I needed to know, and that they could only be said in person, in my father’s study, with Juliet present.

So now we were gathered there.