You can go on being a king of dust and shadows.

Or you can finally, at the very end of all my failures, become a brother.

The study held its silence like a held breath.

I looked at the yellowed pages in Hollis’s trembling hands and understood that my father, who had spent forty years teaching me that love was leverage and mercy was weakness, had used the last clear-eyed weeks of his life to build me a door — a cruel door, a door with a gun behind it, because a gun was the only kind of door he knew how to build — but a door all the same, out of the room he had locked me in.

It was the only way he had of loving me.