He was being patient.

There is an enormous difference between the two, and it took my father’s whole scheme collapsing in a single morning to teach me what it was.

Chapter 7 — The Key and the Folder

My father arrived on a gray Tuesday with his new wife, Courtney, who was twenty-four — two years younger than my youngest cousin, thirty-two years younger than him — and they did not knock.

He still had the emergency key I’d never thought to take back.