But I think, if he had imagined it, he would have built it the same way — because the whole of my father’s life was the quiet, unglamorous work of making sure the people he loved would be protected even when he was no longer there to protect them himself.

He was there, that day in the kitchen.

He had been dead for a year, and he was still there, watching, keeping a copy.

He saved my life from inside his grave.

I have cried more over that fact than over almost anything else in this whole story, and they are not entirely sad tears, and I want to try to explain why, because it is the deepest thing I carried out of all of it.

When my father was alive, I loved him, but I confess I sometimes found his carefulness a little tiresome — the backups, the copies, the security system, the endless quiet fussing over locks and records and contingencies, the way he could not simply trust that things would be fine.