Dog tags.

Dozens of them.

It took me a moment to understand what I was looking at, and when I did, something in me went cold and still.

Each of those tags had belonged to a person — a service member, most of them dead, my father’s mother had said, fallen. And my father had collected them, or bought them, or however he had come by them, and turned them into paper: names of the dead entered onto fraudulent tax documents, ghosts conscripted to shave money off what he owed.

The veterans lining the aisle had come, I realized, not only to honor Ezekiel but because this was personal to them in the deepest possible way — because my father had desecrated the memory of their own, had used the tags of people they had served beside as accounting tricks.

Looking at that bag of tangled silver, I finally understood the true scale of what my father was, which was not merely a thief.