He had reached back into his own past, to whatever had happened between him and my father thirty years earlier, and he had arranged — I did not yet know how, or why — for me to be the one holding the key at the end.

He had trusted a stranger’s daughter, the accountant’s girl, over his own wife and son.

The envelope was not yet in my hands; it would take another week of legal process before the box’s contents could be formally released to me.

But I already understood the essential thing it would tell me: that Alistair Abernathy had looked at his own family and, finding them wanting, had reached outside it for someone he could trust to remember the truth.

And that someone, for reasons buried thirty years deep, was me.