He said that when they drafted it, my father had specified that the house was to be my separate property and had asked, twice, whether that would hold if there was pressure later.

If there was pressure later.

Here is the thing about the archive that matters most, and it is the reason I am alive.

Christopher lived in that house for eleven years.

He never knew it was there.

Not because I hid it from him — I want to be precise, because I have been accused of running a secret life in my own home, and I did not.

It is that in 2013, when we moved in, I showed it to him, and he looked into a dusty four-by-six void full of cardboard tubes and said, “Huh,” and never thought about it again.