Raymond Holt had kept everything.
That was the first thing Celeste said.
Not some of it. Not the pieces that were easiest to keep, the ones with the least personal cost, the ones that could be held without too much weight. Everything. Eighteen years of everything, organised with the specific thoroughness of a man who had understood, on the night he drove away from Crimson Ridge for the last time, that what he was carrying was not his to discard.
He had kept the original assessment notes. The pre-natal records in his own handwriting, unedited, undoctored, with the diagnosis written out in full in the careful clinical language he had used for thirty years of practice. He had kept the correspondence, three letters from Conrad in the weeks after the birth, formal and precise and entirely wi
