Chapter 12 — The Study

Everything that mattered after that happened in my father’s study.

It was a room I had kept exactly as he had left it on the night, six years earlier, when his heart finally stopped in the middle of a phone call about a shipment.

I had not been able to bring myself to change it, though I could not have told you why; I was not a sentimental man, or I had not believed I was.

The smell of it had never left — cedar, and the expensive pipe tobacco he had smoked against every doctor’s advice, and the deep worn smell of old leather.