That, too, I have learned, is a kind of love, the harder kind, the kind that lets a person carry the full truth of what they did rather than snatching it away out of your own discomfort.

Chapter 15 — Some College Kid

“What things?” I asked.

“What did he find?” My father was quiet for a moment, and then his eyes moved, almost against his will, to the small flash drive sitting on the table between us.

“The truth,” he said.

Just those two words, and the way he said them, low and heavy, told me that he had known, all those years ago, at least the shape of what Julian had been uncovering.

The truth.