Arthur Vance.

Lead Attorney.

I stared at the name on the signature line until the letters seemed to blur, because of all the things I had braced myself to find in that binder, my mother’s estranged brother was not one of them.

My mother did not talk about Arthur.

That was one of the fixed facts of my childhood, one of those adult silences that children learn to navigate without ever fully understanding.

There had been some rift, some break, long before I was old enough to know the details, and the result was simply that my mother’s brother did not exist in our lives.