He looked at the two of us, the acknowledged son and the hidden daughter, standing on opposite sides of the room our father had ruled from, and something in his tired face suggested he had imagined this moment many times and dreaded every version of it.

He had the look of a man standing at the edge of something he had helped build long ago and now had to watch operate.

I would learn, later, that Hollis Crane had argued with my father about this arrangement when it was drafted — had told him it was cruel, had told him there were gentler ways to force a son toward decency.

My father had overruled him, as my father overruled everyone, and the old attorney had spent twenty years carrying the instructions of a dead man he had not entirely agreed with, which is its own quiet kind of burden.