“That’s enough for now,” Hollis said gently, and he slid two thick cream-colored envelopes across the leather desktop.

“The past cannot be rewritten.

But your father left very specific instructions for how the present was to be handled, and it is my job, and has been for twenty years, to see that his instructions are carried out.”

He touched the first envelope, which was sealed with a disk of red wax bearing the Hale family signet, the old crest my father had been absurdly proud of.

My father had commissioned that crest from a heraldist in London the year his fortune first crossed some threshold he cared about, and he had stamped it on everything after — his stationery, his cufflinks, the gates of the estate, now the wax seal on the document that held his daughter’s future.