“He’s still young enough to believe shared blood excuses decades of absence.”

That line landed closer to the bone than I expected — not because it was accurate, but because Calder had asked me almost the same question in a letter I’d kept folded in my desk drawer for months.

He had tracked me down through an obscure forwarding P.O. box I kept for formal correspondence I never intended to answer. His first letter was handwritten, on thick textured paper in careful blue ink, without a trace of corporate polish.

Aunt Maren, it began. I don’t know what actually happened between you and my father, but nobody in this house will tell me the truth.

I had read that opening sentence twice, sitting in my sterile office.

He wrote that his only vivid memory of me was from a humid Tuesday when he was six. I had taken him to a public park because his mother was down with a migraine and the men were locked in a board meeting.