“First, let me say that your recollection of my father was so typical, so perfect. I doubt my father had ever seen an entire episode of The Sopranos, but he was going to die on that hill, wasn’t he? And please, call me Tricia.”

She indicated for him to come into the office and wished she had made more of an effort in her personal appearance. I must look awful, she thought.

“Sit.”

“Thank you. And thank you for the other night. He was a special man and he obviously has a special family,” Raj said, never taking his eyes off Tricia. “It was a privilege to be there.”

“You’re welcome. We’re grateful so many of his friends and colleagues could be there,” Tricia said, clearing off her father’s desk, so they weren’t speaking over a pile of notebooks. “I’m sorry we didn’t get in touch with you sooner.”

“No apologies necessary,” Raj said, taking a seat. “I understand, grief can be all-consuming. I was surprised to hear from you so quickly.”

Tricia thought about his comment. “Did you recently lose someone?”

Raj looked at her, not connecting the dots, so Tricia explained, “You said grief can be all-consuming. Is that from personal experience?”

“Yes. A good friend,” he responded, shuffling in his seat. “Some days, I’m not myself.”

“I understand completely.” Tricia did understand, but not for the reasons Raj assumed.

“Of course. Losing a parent is monumental.”

“Losing anyone can be monumental.” There was a pause in the conversation that felt more natural than awkward.

According to his biography on the Sterling Library website, which, of course, Tricia had researched before contacting him and then read aloud to her sisters, Raj Chaudhry was the associate librarian for literature in English. He did his undergraduate work at the College of William & Mary with a degree in comparative literature and his graduate work in Library Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. (It followed that Tricia Googled “Best Ph.D.

programs in Library Science” and discovered that UNC was one of them.) He was fluent in German and French and had a grasp of basic Italian and Spanish. Under “special skills,” there was a laundry list of software programs, including SurveyMonkey, which, Tricia observed to Maggie and Liza, didn’t really qualify as a special skill, but the guy did have his doctorate.

There hadn’t been a picture next to Raj Chaudry’s name, or Maggie would have commented that he looked more like an actor than a librarian, with wavy hair that hung down in his eyes and the right amount of facial hair.

Tricia collected herself. “As I said in my email, I feel like we could really use your expertise. Obviously, we’d like to get my father’s papers to Yale in the best possible shape and in some kind of order. Are you still interested in working on the project even if my father won’t be part of it?”

“Very much so. I feel even more responsibility to take on the work. I admire your father’s writing tremendously.”

“Really?”

“That surprises you?”

“A little. My father was a man of a different era.”

“I learned a lot from him about life. I grew up in suburban Virginia.

There wasn’t a lot of guts and glory in my neighborhood. My high school was full of kids of government employees who followed the rules. I choose Never Not Nothing for a book report freshman year. It changed the course of my life.”

“How so?”

“I was headed toward a career in computer science like my parents. Both of them are programmers who work for the military. I thought I’d be a programmer. But then I discovered literature, like guy’s literature. And that made a difference. Not that books by women can’t be life-changing.”

“I get it. My father’s work tended to speak to males at vulnerable ages and stages. In today’s parlance, a publisher would say that a coming-of-age story like Never Not Nothing was targeted at the adolescent male market.”

“True. And guilty.”

Tricia pulled a bottle of water out of the stocked mini-fridge in her father’s office and handed it to Raj. “Did my father pour you a Scotch and have you watch the sunset when you came to the house?”

“Yes.”

Tricia nodded. “That meant he liked you.”

Raj was quiet and then, “That means something to me.”

Tricia shifted topics with an all-business tone. “So how will this work?

I’m not really familiar with the process of getting his papers from the boathouse to the archives here.”

“For the first few weeks, it will be organizational, figuring out what is on site, what’s valuable, a system of cataloguing that makes sense for your father’s work. Sometimes, that’s chronological, other times not. I could also catalogue by projects or genre. Then I digitize all the files on site. And then, we’ll pack them up and move them to our library for further study,” Raj answered. “I had planned on working with your father on additional research and annotation. That’s a tremendous loss to scholarship.” Then Raj backtracked. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply my loss was greater than yours.”

“No worries. I appreciate what you do.” Tricia felt a sense of relief for the first time since Cap had read the will. Maybe her father’s reputation could be salvaged after the news about the lost memoir and the secret daughter were revealed. Raj was the key to legitimacy.

“Raj, I’m sure you understand that some of the material you uncover is personal and sensitive. We had our lawyer draw up a nondisclosure agreement. There are a few . . .” Tricia searched for the right word. “. . . a few topics that may arise in your work that we as the family would like to keep private in the short term. This is a limited-time NDA. We don’t intend to silence you forever. There are details about the estate we’d like to work

out before anyone speaks to the press or to any other entities. I’m sure you can understand. The term of the contract is one year.”

Tricia slid the five-page agreement across the desk. He didn’t hesitate to pick it up and start reading it, despite Tricia saying, “Feel free to run that by a lawyer.”

“No need,” Raj answered. “I have a pretty good working knowledge of contract law. I interned in a law firm in college.”

“That means you’re pretty much a lawyer.”

“You must be a lawyer?”

“I am. But I also have a library card, so I’m pretty much an archivist, too.”

“I deserved that.” Raj worked his way slowly through the document and then announced, “Can we make the term six months? There may be an academic paper in this work for me and I don’t want to get delayed in publishing it. I’m not interested in your father’s personal life, only his work.” He slid the agreement back across the desk.

Tricia took a pen and found the appropriate clause. She crossed out the dates, then looked up at Raj. “Nine months.”

“Seven.”

“I can back out of this entire situation, you know. We’re asking for privacy.”

“I think you need me. Seven months. That will give me time to do the work, write it up, and find a journal interested in publishing it. I can live with seven months.”

“Fine, seven months. Please don’t test this.” Tricia tried to keep the exhilaration out of her voice. She loved negotiating and she liked this ambitious librarian.

As soon as he signed the agreement, she was able to ask about the most pressing issue at hand. “We’re looking for the manuscript of my father’s memoir. But it’s nowhere—not on his desktop or laptop, and we can’t find a hard copy in Southport or here. Would you know anything about that?”

“Ah, hence the NDA,” Raj said, eyes wide open. “Yes, yes I do. We talked about it quite a bit. It’s how I got to know your father. He’d come into the library, requesting books he wanted to reference in his memoir. I’d put together stacks every month for him and we’d talk about what he was working on.”

Tricia made a mental note to circle back to the content of their conversations later, but for now, she needed a straight answer. “Sorry to skip ahead here, but did you see the actual manuscript?”

“Your father asked me to put the file on a thumb drive and erase it from his hard drive. So that’s what I did.”

“When?”

“That day in May. The day I went to Southport to talk about the project and see his office. Before we had the Scotch and after we had talked for hours.”

“Do you know where that thumb drive is?”

“No. Your father said he wanted to put it somewhere safe but I didn’t ask where that was. He also had a hard copy, as I recall, in one of those manuscript boxes. I got the impression he was going to keep them together.

He said to me that he wasn’t quite done remembering. He wanted to sit on the manuscript for a while.”

He wasn’t quite done remembering. Oh, Dad. “Are you sure he didn’t say anything about where he was going to hide the thumb drive?”