“Remember our week on Cape Cod before the wedding?”

“I remember the cold,” I said.

He stopped by a stone bench on the corner of Sixty-Fourth Street and turned to face me, blocking the winter wind with his broad shoulders.

“We built something real, Lauren.

We can rebuild it if you make the noise stop.”

“What noise?” I asked.

“The lawyers, your father, the trust filings,” he said, his managerial tone slowing into something that sounded almost human.

“You make the noise stop, and we go back to being a family.”