Mom does it to me too, so it’s probably a family thing, but you’re worse.”

My brother — who has broken banking syndicates, who took a jet at four in the morning without asking me a single question — sat in my kitchen and went red.

“Phoebe,” I said.

“No,” said Grant. “No, she’s right.”

We had it out that night, after she went up. It was the first genuine argument I have had with my brother since I was twenty-nine and it lasted four hours and neither of us won.

His position, which is not stupid: he got a phone call at eleven at night from a sister he had not heard from in six years, who was in a locked basement with a bleeding child, and he has organized every day since so that phone call cannot happen again, and he is not sorry.