All day I had been carrying an ocean of emotion, grief and rage and guilt and a love so fierce it frightened me, and there was nowhere to put any of it that would help my mother.

Feelings, however justified, do not change a lock or freeze an account.

Arthur took all of that from me, not by dismissing it, but by translating it.

He heard my rage and replied with a statute.

He heard my fear and replied with a deadline.

It was exactly what I needed, because it meant I could set the ocean down for a few hours and trust that it was being converted, by competent hands, into the only currency that would actually protect my mother: the plain, dry, unanswerable language of the law.

“All right,” he said.