He held Brandon’s eyes. “So tell me. Of the two of you — you and her — which one should decide what happens to the work of my whole life?”

The rain filled the silence. Brandon stood frozen, and Roderick could see the war going on in him — the disbelief, the fear of being made a fool, the almost physical recoil from a thing this large, and underneath all of it, impossibly, hope.

Because somewhere behind the young man’s eyes was a fourteen-year-old girl in a cardiology ward whose life had just been laid on the table.

At last Brandon took out his phone with a hand that was not quite steady, and asked, in a voice gone rough, “What’s the number?”

Chapter 4 — A Solemn Duty

Jace Carlton had been Roderick Benedict’s attorney for twelve years, and when the call came a little after nine that night, he understood two things almost at once.

The first was that his client was dying. The second was that whatever Roderick wanted done, it would have to be done in a way that no court in the country could later pick apart — because a will that hands eighty-two million dollars to a hospital orderly instead of a lawful widow is a will that will be attacked from every angle, by every expensive litigator the widow can hire, for as long as it takes.