His name was Charles Mercer, and he had been my father’s wealth manager for almost twenty years, and I had called him a friend of the family my entire adult life.

Charles was everything Nathan was not — silver-haired, unhurried, impeccably kind, the sort of man who remembered your birthday and the name of your childhood dog.

He had managed my father’s fortune since before I finished law school, and when my father died he had become the trustee of everything, the steady hand on the family fortune, the man everyone trusted precisely because trusting him was so effortless.

And that, I understood as the architecture finally resolved itself in front of me, was the whole point of him.