But I had watched this old man’s silence buy two decades of comfort with other people’s ruin, and cost my son a father, and I did not believe absolution was mine to hand out on behalf of the dead men who’d actually paid for it.

What I could offer him was smaller and truer: a task.

He had spent his life proving an Ashgrave could bury anything.

He could spend the end of it proving that an Ashgrave could, just once, do the opposite — sit in a deposition room and say the unsayable thing plainly, and let the truth do to his name what it had every right to do.

That was not forgiveness.