Rhett was still standing there like a man in a house that had come down around him, and I decided he had earned, if nothing else, the truth about his father.

So I told him.

“Your father found out three years ago,” I said.

“When he started asking where the money was going, he hired his own people, and they found the children before they found the fraud.” I took the Christmas card from inside my jacket — worn soft at the folds now, ten years old — and I did not hand it to him, because it was mine, but I let him see it.

“He wrote to me.