Not to my father.
To me.
"The groceries in the hall," he said. "There's yogurt. It'll turn."
He left before I could answer.
I stood in the middle of my father's living room for a long moment, listening to his footsteps disappear down the stairwell, and thought about the fact that this man, this stranger who had just rearranged the entire architecture of my life in under twenty minutes, had noticed the yogurt.
I went to the hall and brought the groceries inside.
I put everything away.
I did not speak to my father.
Later, after he'd fallen asleep on the couch with the television running, I went to my room and opened the drawer where I kept the things I actually valued: my grandfather's watch, a photograph of my mother I'd found in a box I wasn't supposed to open, and a small black flash drive my grandfather had pressed into my palm the last time I saw him, two weeks before he died.
"Keep this," he'd said. "Don't open it unless you need real protection. The kind that matters."
I turned it over in my hands.
Thought about the word protection.
Thought about Dominic Moreau, sitting in my father's chair like he'd always belonged in it, saying I can't legally compel you, which was, I realized now, the most careful sentence in the whole conversation. Not I won't. Not I wouldn't. Only that he couldn't. Legally.
I put the flash drive in my jacket pocket.
Tomorrow, apparently, I was going to New Orleans.
* * *
Chapter 2: No Choice
I didn't sleep.
Not because I was afraid, or not only because of that. I didn't sleep because I kept turning the conversation over, looking for the angle I'd missed, the clause in the argument I hadn't answered well enough. The point at which a different response would have produced a different outcome.
I didn't find one.
At four in the morning I gave up on sleep and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table with my grandfather's flash drive in my hand. I turned it over and over, the same way I always did when I needed to think. It had the right weight, the right resistance between my fingers, something to hold onto while the rest of it moved.
Only open it if you need real protection. The kind that matters.
My grandfather had known something. I'd always suspected it, filed it in the cabinet with everything else I didn't want to examine too closely. He'd been a careful man, not secretive, just precise. He chose what he said. He chose what he kept. When he pressed this into my hand two weeks before he died, he hadn't looked frightened. He'd looked like a man settling accounts.
I put it back in my jacket pocket. Drank my coffee. Listened to my father snore on the couch.
At some point my father woke. I heard him shuffle to the bathroom, stop in the kitchen doorway. He stood there for amoment. I looked at him. He looked at me. Neither of us found anything useful to say. He went back to the couch.
* * *
The lawyer arrived at nine.
He was a small man with a large briefcase and the practiced blankness of someone paid to witness things without having opinions about them. He shook my father's hand, accepted coffee he didn't drink, and spread four documents across our kitchen table with the efficiency of a man who'd done this before. Many times. For many families who sat at kitchen tables just like this one and looked at pages just like these.
I read every word.
My father signed without reading. Page two, page three, the final page, he picked up the pen each time with the resigned speed of a man who'd made his decision long before the papers arrived and saw no point in pretending otherwise. The lawyer noted each signature, initialed where required, and moved on.