“He knows nothing of any of this,” I reminded him, “and we cannot know if he will even want to.” “I understand the risk,” he said.

“For twenty-nine years I did not search properly because I was afraid of finding a closed door.

I have paid far too high a price already for letting fear make my choices.” And so, after the trial had run its long course and both men had been sentenced to serve real time for what they had done, after Raymond had stood in the garden pruning a citrus tree and told me quietly that the justice of it gave him no satisfaction, that the law existed to keep those men from harming anyone else and not to give him back the months he had lost, he made his decision.

He would go and find his son himself.