This was warmth turned all the way up and pointed at my son, and it frightened me more than any of their old coldness ever had.

They were not looking at Cody the way you look at a child.

They were looking at him the way you look at a document you need signed — and a mother knows the difference the way she knows her own heartbeat.

Dinner was suffocating.

Over the wine and the roasted meat the family ran a quiet, coordinated campaign, talking of “securing the family name,” of how a young widow would surely want to move on, rebuild, start fresh — the thesis underneath perfectly clear: Porter’s shares needed to stay under the strict governance of the bloodline. They want me to hand over everything, I understood, chewing mechanically, nodding at nothing.

And in the way they never quite looked at Denton, in the little glances that skipped past him toward Dax, I understood something else too: that whoever was really running this table, it was no longer the old man at the head of it.