And Alistair had known it was a lie, or was becoming one, and he had known that no story, however polished, could survive contact with the one thing that does not care about a family’s dignity and cannot be talked around: the documented, dated, unforgiving record of what the money actually did.

Stories bend.

Paper does not.

He had built his defense against his own family not out of accusations, which could be denied, but out of ledgers, which could not.

And in doing so he had left, for whoever came after, a weapon more powerful than any testimony: the cold, patient, incorruptible memory of the paper itself.

There is a reason, I have come to think, that the powerful fear documents more than they fear witnesses, and Alistair understood it exactly.

A witness can be discredited.