“There’s something,” he said, “that your mother never knew about me.”

I braced myself.

I assumed he was about to confess some old debt, some financial trouble he had carried in secret — the kind of thing a proud man of his generation might hide to the very end.

Instead he asked me to reach behind the bookshelf, where there was a thick leather folder wedged out of sight, and to bring it to him.

Inside it were documents.

Not old letters, not photographs.