My stepdad raised me after my mom d*ed when I was 4 — at his fun*ral, an old man leaned in and said, “Check the bottom drawer in your stepfather’s garage if you want the truth about your mom.”

And Abner Lachance, who has not driven a car since 1985, who rode a bicycle to a lumberyard for nineteen years, who came to a fun*ral on two buses to say one sentence to a stranger at a door, said:

“Because while I’m here you can just ask me.”

So I ask him.

Second Saturday of October, and most other months besides, in a front room eleven miles from where I grew up — about my mother, about the rain, about four notes of a song neither of us will ever identify.

And every single time I drive home afterward, I think the same thing, and it is not about my stepfather’s lie at all.

It is that two men spent forty-one years writing to each other about the worst night of both their lives, and neither of them ever once used the word forgive.

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