He saw square footage and market value and an auction date, and he could not quite keep the pleasure of it off his face, three weeks after the funeral, with the flowers barely wilted.

I saw it, and my heart sank, because I understood what it meant for me.

And I was right to fear it.

But I did not yet know that his father had seen it coming years before I did.

I have wondered, since, how it must have felt to be Mr.

Christopher in those last years — to love a son, as he surely did, all the way to the end, and at the same time to know, with a clear and unsentimental eye, exactly what that son would do the moment he was gone.