He had swapped a newborn between families the way he would move an asset between accounts, because in the ledger of his soul a baby and an asset were the same kind of entry.

And now, stripped of the suits and the lawyers, he looked at me across that cold table and could not fathom what he had done wrong, only that he had been caught. I did it for the family. He said it the way a man says something he considers self-evidently virtuous.

But there was no family.

That was what he had never grasped.

A family is not a name you protect; it is the people you protect, and he had fed every actual person in his orbit — his son, his son’s child, the woman his son loved, even the daughter-in-law he’d bought — into the machine that protected the name.

He had ground up the family to preserve the word “family,” and he could not see the difference, and he was going to prison still unable to see it.