Somebody from the cemetery will have picked it up within a day. There’s no protocol for that either. I have thought about the person who found it more than I’ve thought about almost anything else in this account.

I speak to my father about once a month.

It is not repaired and I do not expect it to be. We talk about boats and about Adeyemi’s next case and about a series of increasingly bad-tempered letters he is writing to a Maryland zoning board.

Twice he has started to say something else and I have let him not finish it.

He sent me his operational log — all eleven years, unredacted, HOMESTEAD and everything. I have read forty pages of it. I will read the rest when I am ready and possibly never, and he knows that, and he has never asked.

Rachel Mercer is still my lawyer and is now, improbably, my friend, and has strong opinions about my apartment.