I know your mind is racing, trying to reconcile the old man who shared your tea with the ghost standing on those courthouse steps in 1981.

I told you I was a wealthy man who made his fortune in commercial shipping.

That was not a lie.

But I never told you how I got my starting capital.

I never told you what I abandoned to build an empire. And then came the sentence that stopped the breath in my body, that ended one life and began another, written in a dead man’s careful hand. Your mother’s name was Clara.

You were three years old when I left. I stopped reading.