My father drove down from Conifer with a box.
Not a large box. Shoebox-sized. The kind of box a man keeps in the back of a closet behind winter coats and old boots, the kind of box a man's daughter would never look inside because daughters don't search their father's closets for evidence of the thing that destroyed their family.
He set it on the kitchen island at forty-two stories. Cole was at the window. Marcos was at the table with his tablet. I was standing with my hands on the stone the way I stood at every counter in my life — palms down, grounded, waiting for the shot to pull.
"I kept records," my father said.
The room changed temperature. Not a phrase anyone expected from a man who couldn't keep his truck insured. I kept records. From the mouth of a mechanic from Conifer who'd been making payments to men who didn't send invoices for nineteen years.
