We sat in the same living room where it had all come apart a decade before, the furniture older but arranged just as I remembered, and for a moment the strangeness of being back in that room nearly undid me.

Then I opened my bag, and I took out the things I had carried for ten years.

The first was a photograph.

I set it down on the table between us, and I watched my father’s face as he picked it up.

It showed two men standing together outside the plant on the edge of town, in conversation, one of them clearly my father, younger, and the other a young man with an earnest face and dark hair.

Across the bottom, in handwriting that was not my father’s, someone had written a single line: YOUR FATHER TRIED TO WARN THEM.