I could not work out what it was for until I got home and checked, and then I understood that March of 2003 is when I had orthodontic work, and that my father was at sea, and that she had never once mentioned it.

I sat on my floor with a passbook and a green chair in the back of Hannah’s car and thought: I have spent six years being an expert in following money, and it took me eleven years to open a door I was already paying for.

Hannah Vozniak is not a relation. It is a common Polish surname and it is one of the reasons we became friends at seventeen — the girl with my mother’s name — and when I told her what I was doing she had to leave the room for a while.

The firm is Reed & Vozniak Forensic now. The stationery cost eleven hundred dollars.

Chapter 18 — The Drawer

There were seventy-one envelopes in the drawer when I finally opened it.

I did it in November, on a Saturday, at my kitchen table, with the water outside the window doing what it does in the afternoon.