Nobody wrote on a card. That was the first answer I got. They sat with the pens in front of them for a long moment and then Dashiell asked, very politely, whether the house was held in trust, and I understood that the year Ambrose asked for had not been a test at all. It had been a mercy. He had wanted me to find out while there was still time to build something else with what was left of my life.

The brass key in that envelope opened a desk drawer in the upstairs study, and the letter with it explained the condition. Ambrose had changed his will eleven months before he died, after Rosalind telephoned him asking whether I would be inheriting anything and how soon. He wrote that he had not told me because he did not want me to carry that knowledge into every Christmas. He wrote that he had come on Thursdays for eighteen years because somebody should have been coming, and that the house was not a reward for enduring my family but a door out of the habit of enduring anything.