You were not walking into a trap set for you, Evelyn.

You were being walked, gently, through the one door he had spent twenty years designing to bring you safely home.

I remember thinking, as Mr.

Vance laid out the mechanism of it, that only a certain kind of mind could have conceived such a thing, and that it was exactly the mind of the man I had known.

Julian had been an engineer, and this was engineering, of the most humane and extraordinary kind.

He had faced a genuinely impossible problem, how to make me legally, unarguably his daughter, in a way that would hold up against a battery of hostile lawyers, without generating a single document, filing, or record that his enemies could detect while he was alive to be threatened.