“That’s why he kept his study door locked.”

Samuel reached back into the safe, lifted out the folded yellow paper, and handed it across the desk to me.

Dad’s handwriting covered the lined paper in dark blue ink, written with the clipped authority he had used when he ran the machine shop on Main Street.

“Read it, Elena,” Samuel said softly.

I held the yellow paper near the window light, my thumb brushing over the heavy ink strokes.

“Julian believes he took everything I worked forty years to build,” Dad had written in his clean, steady hand.