He had held the letter and the box and the key, waiting, bound by a promise to a dying friend, for the day he could finally hand them over.

And now that day had come, and he was watching a young woman he had known about for two decades but never met come apart in a plastic chair in a hospice lobby, learning in the space of an hour that everything she believed about her own origins was false.

He could have been clinical about it.

He was not.

Beneath the lawyer’s precision there was real tenderness, the tenderness of a man completing the last and most delicate task his oldest friend had ever entrusted to him, and doing it as gently as it could be done.