On Father’s Day my millionaire son walked into my freezing apartment, saw the tinned soup on the table, and asked how I was managing on the eight thousand a month his wife sends me. I told him nobody sends me anything.

Nine years late. At a kitchen table. Out loud, by me, to my son’s wife, who had never met Marianne and who cried, which I had not expected and did not know what to do with.

Emmett is not all right about any of this and I do not expect him to be for about a year.

He has had to sit down and look at three years of asking a question and accepting the answer.

He is forty-one. He has about four hundred staff. He is extremely good at solving things and he has solved everything that has come at him since 2017.

And he cannot fix this one with money, because the money was already there, and because the problem was in a hallway on the fourth of every month.