I had grown up on the clean version of that story — that my grandfather was a stubborn old man who’d made bad bets in his last years, that the debts were his own doing, that the crash was a tragedy and nothing more.

That was the story the town believed, and it was the story I believed, because it was the story someone had spent money and years making sure we would believe.

Sitting in that locker with my brother, I watched my whole family history turn inside out.

My grandfather had not been a failing old fool.

He had been an honest man who said no to the wrong people and paid for it with everything, and then had his good name quietly rewritten as foolishness so that no one would look too hard at how neatly his empire had fallen into a rival’s hands.

The Merricks had not only taken our docks and our parents.