My father, careful even in his fear, had built or found a false bottom in his dead wife’s trunk.

I got my fingers into the seam and pried up the thin wooden panel, and underneath it, sealed inside a plastic freezer bag against the damp, was a small black leather notebook.

I sat down on the cabin floor and opened it.

Page after page after page, in my father’s neat engineer’s hand, growing shakier as the months went on: dates, invoice numbers, the names of shell companies, license plates, and beside several of them, copied out with painstaking care, the loops and slashes of Ryan’s forged signatures.

It was everything.