I carried it for ten years, Dad, moving it from apartment to apartment, keeping it where no one would ever think to look, telling no one it existed, because I had promised him I would hold it until the moment was right.” My voice thickened.

“Ten years, Dad.

Do you understand what today is?

It’s been exactly ten years.

I didn’t come back on this particular week by accident.” That was not entirely the truth, and I said it knowing it was not, because the fuller truth was too tangled to explain in that moment.

I had not planned the timing consciously.

Grace had asked to come on her tenth birthday, and it was only as we drove that I had realized, with a strange cold jolt, what ten years meant, that we were arriving at the very threshold Julian had spoken of, the point at which he had believed the evidence could finally be brought forward without being made to vanish.

I did not fully understand the legal machinery of it, then or now; I am not a lawyer, and Julian had explained it to a frightened nineteen-year-old in the little time we had.