He's made strides in the months I've been here. And before that. He was here long before I was.

[He frowns, looking for terms that would make sense to someone outside the family.]

He's moved beyond whatever it was that gripped him when my mother died. I've called it madness, but his senses were about him, even if he wasn't quite bowing to them. It was, in some ways, a natural conclusion of being what he is. As old, as powerful, as unused to helplessness as him. And he's conceded that it was... not wrong, exactly, but unproductive, cruel, not what she'd have wanted.