There was so much I could have said in that moment, so many old grievances I could have reached for, so many explanations and accusations and apologies that had been sitting unspoken between us for the better part of a decade.

I said none of them.

There would be time, I understood, or there would not, but this was not the moment for any of it, because I had not called my brother to reopen our old war or to sue for peace in it.

I had called him for a reason that made all of that suddenly, completely small.

“Arthur,” I said, and I looked down at the second page of the file still open against my arm, at the name printed there that had stopped my heart ten minutes earlier.

“I need you to listen to me, because I’m about to tell you something, and I need you to sit down for it.” I heard him, on the other end, go quiet and still in the way a person does when they understand that the ground is about to shift.