“About how he was the only one who never made me feel like I had to earn anything.” He did not know yet how close to the center of everything that sentence sat.

Bettina arrived ten minutes later, and the three of us drove to the deposit facility downtown.

The manager, a soft-spoken man who remembered my father, took us down to the private lockers and opened B-27 once Bettina produced the paperwork.

“Your father paid ten years in advance on this box,” he said.

“No one else has ever opened it.” The door swung back.

Inside, under a film of dust, sat a dark blue steel trunk.