He had handed me a drive just like it years earlier, and told me, in his plain way, to always keep copies, and I had assumed, at the time, that he meant tax documents and property receipts and warranties — the ordinary paper of an ordinary careful life.

I had nodded and forgotten it, the way you forget most of what your parents tell you until the day you suddenly, achingly understand it.

Standing in his workshop, holding that drive, I understood it completely.

My father had not only meant documents.

He had meant something much larger, learned across a whole life of being an ordinary man in a world that does not protect ordinary people unless they protect themselves. Keep copies. Keep copies of the truth, because people will try to erase it.

Keep copies of what was said and done, because the powerful rewrite the story and count on you having nothing to contradict them.