But my father stared at it as though I had laid a live thing between us, and in a sense I had.

It is a strange thing, to watch someone look at an ordinary object and see in it the shape of their own undoing.

To my father, that little flash drive was not a piece of plastic.

It was the night Vale sat in his living room.

It was the choice he had made and the daughter he had lost making it.

It was ten years of a secret so heavy it had bent him out of his own shape.