And when Raymond called after him, as his nephew turned at last toward the door, it was not with triumph but with a deep and terrible sorrow.

“For twenty years I sat you at my table because I believed you were the only real family I had left.

If I had died thinking you were merely greedy, I might have found a way to forgive you.

But I heard you, Christopher.

You will never explain that away with any amount of money.” That was the heart of it, I think, the wound that no verdict and no prison sentence would ever quite reach.

It was not the money Christopher had tried to take, or even the life.