“I was just thinking about your grandfather’s will,” I said, watching the trees go by.

“Your grandmother was so obsessed with stealing your cash that she completely forgot the clause about the deed to that giant house.”

I told Quinn the whole of it on that drive, because she was eighteen now and had earned the truth.

Her great-grandfather — my father, the man she barely remembered — had not only built the wall around her college fund.

He had built a second one, quieter, around the house itself.

He had known that Frances’s whole sense of power ran on that estate, the manicured lawns and the three-car garage and the stage they gave her, and he had known she would cling to it and leverage it and hide behind it long after he was gone.