Instead she went very still, the way a person goes still when a thing they had stopped hoping for arrives at last and turns out to be both everything and nothing, the words they needed and the father still gone, the wound named at last and still a wound.”

I looked across the room at Juliet.

The tears were running freely down her face now, but she made no sound, and she did not look away from the old attorney reading her dead father’s apology, the apology he had been too much of a coward to make while he lived.

“I cannot undo it,” the letter went on.

“A dying man learns the limits of his power very quickly, and the chief of them is that the past is the one territory no amount of force can take back.

I cannot give you back the childhood I stole, or the father I refused to be.