When enough people tell you, confidently, for long enough, that you are a liar and a cheat and a disgrace, a terrible thing happens: some small part of you begins to wonder if they might be right, if perhaps you really are the shameful thing they’ve decided you are.

The whole Remington family had told me that story with one voice, all except Theodore.

And Theodore, who had every reason to close his door like the rest of them, had instead sat down one December, an old man alone, and written a few kind lines to a disgraced ex-daughter-in-law at an Army post office box on the other side of the planet, for no reason at all except that he did not believe the story and wanted me to know it.

That card was the one hand held out to me from that whole family across ten years, and I held onto it the way you hold onto a light in a long dark.