At my sister’s wedding reception, my mother demanded I sign over the penthouse my grandmother left me—and when I refused, she slapped me in front of half of Boston. She thought that would finish me. Then my grandmother walked in with a lawyer.

My father noticed it too. I am almost certain of that. He had spent his whole adult life learning how to identify disasters early enough to avoid standing too near the explosion, while somehow never learning how to stop them. That was his genius and his failure. He could sense trouble the way some people sense weather. He just preferred adaptation to intervention. I saw him watching my mother from across the room with that familiar, faintly worried expression that meant he understood exactly enough to feel uneasy and not nearly enough to act. He had always mistaken passivity for peacekeeping. In our house, that mistake had lasted decades.