Christopher had said the day he signed his fortune away from his son and toward his housekeeper, and I understood it fully now, all the way down. Loyalty cannot be bought.

But it can be honored. Justin had spent his whole life believing everything was for sale, and had reached, at the very end, to buy back the one thing that never had been, and had failed, because it cannot be done.

And his father, who had understood the difference his son never would, had spent the last clear act of his life honoring a loyalty that no amount of money could ever have purchased — and in doing so, had reached out from beyond his own grave and made a frightened grandmother and a sleeping little boy safe forever.

I stood for a moment in the warm afternoon light, in the beautiful, quiet house that was somehow, impossibly, ours.

And then I picked up the telephone on the great desk, and I dialed my own apartment, where my grandson was waiting, so that I could tell him — in a steady voice, at last, with no arithmetic left to fear — that everything, from this day forward, was going to be all right.