Christopher grew frail and could not always leave his bed, I learned to make the gentle vegetable broth that was all his stomach could take, and I brought it up to him myself, and I sat while he drank it.

His son, Justin, lived far away, in Chicago, chasing lavish investments and, from what I could see, chasing them badly, because the only times he ever telephoned his father were the times he needed money.

I was the one who was there.

On the long, quiet, rainy afternoons of a rich old man’s final years, when the great house was silent and the light went gray in the tall windows, it was Helena the housekeeper who sat with him, not Justin the heir.

We talked about everything on those afternoons — about his late wife, whom he still missed like a limb, and about my daughter, and about the future of a little boy named Lucas whom Mr.

Christopher had come to think of, I believe, as a kind of grandson.