There was a strange, cold pleasure in helping them build the stage for their own destruction, and I will not pretend there wasn’t.

They wanted an audience; I made sure the audience was complete.

When my mother fretted that a certain investor might not come, I encouraged her to call him personally.

When Torsten debated whether to invite our father’s old partners — the men who had known and respected the man whose company he’d been quietly looting — I told him they absolutely should be there.

I wanted every one of those people in that room.

My mother thought she was assembling witnesses to her family’s triumph and her son’s ascension.