Each item was another sentence in a story that had been assembling itself in secret for years, and that was now being read aloud, at last, by people whose job was to read it.

I want to note something about that morning, because it changed how I understood my father.

Theo Larkin had been a forensic accountant.

He had spent his career on exactly this — the patient assembly of documentary proof, the numbers and dates and records that survive a person’s denials.

And I understood, watching the technicians bag the evidence, that my father had, in a sense, prepared us for this without ever knowing what was coming.

The encrypted drive.