I’ve been finding that out in here for seven years and it’s not as nice as it sounds.”

In the car afterward, Phoebe did not speak until we were past Murfreesboro.

Then she said: “That’s the first time anyone’s told me something about that night without checking my face first to see how I was taking it.”

Chapter 17 — Uncle Grant, You’re Doing the Thing

I should say something about my brothers.

For seven years they ran my life and I let them, and it was not a takeover — it was the most loving thing anyone has ever done for me, and it went on about four years past its use.

Grant is fifty-six. He has organized my security, my properties, my counsel, my daughter’s schooling, my travel, and — I discovered in February — a standing quarterly briefing from my own head of security that comes to him and not to me, and has since 2018.