No TV. No footsteps. No Grant calling from his office that he’d just be another ten minutes on a deck before dinner. The stillness felt expensive. Earned.
Dad’s study was at the back of the house, tucked behind the library alcove and the bar no one used except at Christmas. I opened the door and was hit by the smell of leather, old paper, and the cedar humidor he’d never quite stopped believing made him look like a statesman. His reading lamp cast a warm circle over the desk. On the wall above it hung the framed black-and-white photograph of him at thirty, one foot braced on the deck of a sailboat, grinning into wind.
The safe sat behind a painting of Carmel cliffs in winter. Dad used to think that was hilarious, the way men of a certain age think moving a painting counts as spy craft.
My birthday clicked in under my fingertips. Month, day, year. The lock released with a small mechanical sigh.
Inside were four thick folders, one flash drive, a ring of keys, and a handwritten note on top that simply said: Start with the red file.
Of course he’d organized it.
I sat in his desk chair and opened the red file first.
Private investigator report.