There was really only one thing left to tell him.

“I kept the key,” I said.

I let the words sit in the quiet.

A bird started up somewhere in the wet grass behind me, and the light climbed a little higher on the stones.

And I meant the brass key to the safe, which I had carried on the chain beneath my collar for a year, through the funeral and the arrest and the trial and the founding of the fund.

But I meant the other thing too — the harder thing he had handed me at the end, the patience, the insistence that the truth come out lawfully and in the open rather than be buried to keep a false peace.