His eyes stayed that way.
I let him sit with it for a moment. The recorder between us. Lucas to my left, perfectly quiet,
the way Lucas gets when he knows the next words spoken are going to matter. Daniel to
my right, watching Charles with the careful attention of a man who had spent months
dismantling this operation and was now, for the first time, looking at the person who built it.
I leaned forward slightly.
“I understand the grievance,” I said. “I want you to know that before anything else. What
your father did, what the family did to you, passing you over, cutting you out, treating you
as a lesser heir when by every account you were the one he actually chose in his heart, that
was a real wrong. It was real and it was significant and I’m not going to sit here and pretend
othe
