Chapter 17: The Ledger

Elias unlocked his study safe at two in the morning, and I stood behind him with my father's box in my arms.

Bea had gone home, because I'd told her this part was mine.

He took out a gray folder that was soft at the edges from being opened too many times.

"Before you read his letter," he said, "there's one more thing I haven't told you."

"Everything else, you said."

"I thought it was everything."

"Elias."

"Your father's signature is on the paper that ruined mine."

He laid the folder on the desk and opened it.

It held a foreclosure notice on a six-story building on the east side.

Two signatures sat at the bottom, side by side.

One was Desmond's, and the other was *Frank Doheny*.

My father's square letters looked back at me.

"I found this when I was nineteen," Elias said. "I hated him for six years."

"Then I found you at a coffee cart and I couldn't hate anything."

"You hired me because of this."

"I hired you because I wanted to see what kind of person he'd left behind."

He said it plainly, and it did not help.

"I should have told you in the first week."

"You're telling me now," I said. "Before I read it myself."

"Yes."

I looked at his hands flat on the desk.

They weren't steady, and I'd never seen that.

"Sit," I said.

He sat in his own chair, and I took the one across from him and opened my father's letter.

It was two pages long, in blue ink, and it was the first time since I was seventeen that I'd heard him say anything new.

*Joanna, I signed what Desmond put in front of me for twelve years, because I trusted him and I did not read.*

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