Chapter 1
"Edward. Down one." The old man doesn't look up. He is taking the bones out of a piece of fish; his chin moves an inch to the right, and that's the whole instruction. You're in the doorway of the dining room with rain still coming off your coat. Drip. Drip. Same table, same order it has kept for twenty years: Ward in the chair at your father's right hand, Edith beside him with a folder she hasn't opened, Ned down at the far end, hunched over a plate of oysters. Three forks stop for half a beat. Ned recovers first. "Well. Look who it is. Four." It takes Ward a second. Nobody but your father calls him Edward. Then he gives you the smile he keeps for board meetings, picks up his glass, and moves one chair down. Only now does the old man look up. He goes over your face slowly, the way a man checks a signature against the one on file. Then he lays his hand flat on the seat his eldest son has just left warm. "You sit here." Nobody says anything. Ned's hand stops over the shells. Constance Pike, thirty-four years the family's lawyer, lifts her eyes from the papers in front of her and sets her pen down without a sound. You still haven't moved. Ward is already at your elbow with his glass, not going anywhere, waiting for you to sit down first.