We pieced the timeline together across the phone line, Arthur and I, the two of us assembling from fragments the shape of a tragedy neither of us had known was happening.

Evelyn had died fourteen months earlier.

I will not lay out the particulars of her illness or her passing here, because they are hers, and because a life is not a medical record; what matters is that she had been sick, and that she had faced it, and the end of it, without either of her brothers beside her.

She had been pregnant, and she had told no one.

She had hidden it, Arthur and I came slowly to understand, because of the same family feud that had driven me away and hardened him, the long bitter war over the business that had made our family into a place a frightened, sick, pregnant young woman did not feel she could turn to.