He signed.

The lawyer structured it so that the building’s rental income flowed, over the years, into an escrow account the court kept watch over, and so that the whole of it came to me automatically the moment my mother passed — beyond Delroy’s reach, beyond Lonnie’s, beyond anyone’s power to talk me out of it, the way Delroy had once talked me out of asking a single question.

I looked at the number at the bottom of the page.

One hundred and forty-two thousand dollars.