I drove to the restored house that same afternoon, the final envelope trembling in my coat pocket. Everything was exactly as I remembered it at seventeen, the porch swing, the yellow kitchen, the narrow staircase that still creaked on the fourth step. When I reached our old bedroom, I had to steady myself against the doorframe. Nathaniel had recreated even the faded floral wallpaper. I tore open the envelope with shaking hands and read his instructions, which directed me to a loose panel behind the closet, a hiding spot the two of us had discovered as teenagers and sworn never to tell anyone about.

I pried the panel loose. Behind it, wrapped in oilcloth, sat a small tin box, and inside the box was something that stopped my heart. It was a photograph of the two of us at seventeen, and tucked behind it, a folded document dated more than forty years earlier. It was a will, Nathaniel’s father’s will, the original, the one my father never knew existed. And what it revealed was the thing Nathaniel had wanted me to understand more than anything else, the final truth of what our fathers had truly done.