I have wondered, since, whether Julian knew, when he handed me that drive, that my own father’s name was inside it.

I think he must have.

He had gathered every name himself; he would have known whose signatures he carried.

And if he knew, then he had entrusted the evidence, and our unborn child, to the daughter of one of his own witnesses, a girl whose family was tangled up in the very thing he was trying to expose.

Perhaps that was part of why he chose me.

Perhaps he understood that the truth would find its way home more surely through blood than through any other channel, that a daughter carrying both his child and her father’s confession was the one courier Vale would never think to watch.