The tears came then, all at once, blurring the photograph in my hands, and through them I heard Mr.

Vance begin, gently, to give me back the twenty years I had lost.

“He did not abandon you, Evelyn,” he said.

“That is the first thing you have to understand, because I know it is the story you grew up inside, and it was never true.

Your father did not walk away because he did not want you.

He walked away because it was the only way to keep you alive.” He let me absorb that, and then he went on, his lawyer’s voice steady and careful.

“Twenty-two years ago, Julian was a rising engineer with patents worth an enormous amount of money.