But my father reached across those two years and across his own grave, through nothing but an old habit of caution, and he saved my life and his grandson’s future, and he did it without ever knowing he had done it.

He had installed those recorders years earlier for the most mundane of reasons — carjackings, theft, the ordinary paranoia of a wealthy man protecting his family from strangers.

He could never have imagined the specific danger they would one day capture.

He simply believed, as a matter of principle, that a record is worth keeping, that the truth should be preserved even when you cannot foresee why you might need it.

And that principle, that quiet unglamorous discipline of a careful man, outlasted him, and outlasted Brandon’s cleverness, and won.

I think about that often now, about how the people who love us go on protecting us long after they are gone, in ways they never intended and we never expected, through the habits and the values and the small careful acts they leave behind like seeds.