More than that: the letter is not mine to burn.

It belongs to them.

Someday one of my children — Romy, most likely, who cannot leave a question alone — is going to want to understand her own beginning, all of it, the ugliness and the grief and the strange late tenderness of a grandfather’s letters, and when she does, she will not have to piece it together from rumor and my resentment.

She will have the documents.