I have tried to imagine what it cost him to make that choice — to look at his own wife and son, the people he had built a life and a fortune and a name with, and conclude that he could not trust them with the truth, and reach instead for a stranger’s daughter he had met perhaps a handful of times.

It is one of the loneliest decisions I can imagine a man making.

And it tells me, more than any ledger, what kind of man Alistair Abernathy was: not a warm one, perhaps, not an easy one, but a man who, when finally forced to choose between his family and his integrity, chose integrity, and paid for the choosing in the deepest currency there is, which is trust.

He died having trusted the wrong people his whole life and the right one only at the very end, and never got to know whether his gamble on me would pay off.