We went to the sitting room because standing in the entrance hall felt like a conversation that could be ended too easily, and I wanted walls around this one.
I sat on the sofa. He sat across from me in the chair, not beside me, the distance deliberate and appropriate, the distance of a man about to say things that needed space around them. He set his phone face-down on the table between us. He looked at his hands for a moment. Then he looked at me.
"Your father," he said, "was going to testify."
I said nothing. I had learned, in the weeks of this arrangement, that silence was not agreement. It was just room for the truth to arrive without being interrupted.
"He had compiled documentation over two years," Lucien said. "Financial records, internal communications, evidence of the specifi
