He did not, I think, even register that I was a person in the room, so complete was his focus on the business he had come to transact.

“Where is my mother’s personal safe?” he demanded, his voice loud and impatient in that quiet office.

“My associates and I are here to catalog her final personal effects for the estate probate.

I want an inventory of everything in her suite, and I want it today.” He was, I realized, entirely unmoved by his mother’s death, treating it as a logistical event, a matter of assets and inventories and probate schedules, another item on a busy man’s agenda.

There was no grief in him anywhere.