I am not built for the grand gesture of burning things.

I put it in a drawer, and when my children are old enough to ask the large questions, it will be there, with everything else, plain and unhidden, for them to make of what they will.

People are sometimes surprised by that — that I kept it, that I did not make a bonfire of the man who had cost us so much.

But burning the letter would have been a lie of a different kind, a performance of a rage I had already, mostly, set down, and I had promised my children a life without performances.