At six o’clock the morning after the funeral, I called Martin Shaw.
I called from the shop. I’d driven over in Dad’s truck as soon as the sky started getting light. I sat on his stool at the workbench, in the smell of motor oil and cold metal, with the phone in my other hand.
Martin answered on the second ring.
“Lydia.”
“I have Dad’s phone.”
There was a long breath on the other end of the line.
“Good,” he said. “Bring it to the office at nine-thirty. Come to the back door. Off the alley. I’ll have Denise let you in.”
“Martin, what’s on it?”
“I haven’t heard it,” he said gently. “He recorded it himself. Over three weeks, in August, with my guidance on what he needed to say for it to hold up. But he wouldn’t let me listen. He wanted it fresh, he said, when the time came. He wanted me to hear it the same moment everyone else did.”
I closed my eyes.
“Martin. Am I going to regret this?”
He was quiet for a long moment.
Martin Shaw is seventy years old. He’s practiced estate and trust law in our town for over forty years. He wears a different bow tie every day of the week. And in all the years I’ve known him, he has never once given anybody an easy answer.
“I think you’re going to feel a great many things this morning, Lydia,” he said finally. “Regret may be among them. But I don’t believe it will be the largest.”
The law office of Martin J. Shaw, Esq., is on the second floor of an old red-brick building on Main Street. Above a flower shop. You walk up a narrow staircase that always smells like roses and lilies, and then you open a heavy wooden door, and everything changes.
Dark wood paneling. Green leather chairs. Bookcases full of law books with cracked spines. The smell of lemon furniture polish and old paper.
The conference room had a long mahogany table that seated twelve. A pitcher of ice water in the middle. And at every seat, I noticed, a small box of tissues.
Martin had placed one at every single chair.
I got there at 9:35 and went up the back stairs. Denise, Martin’s secretary for thirty years, hugged me without a word and took me into Martin’s private office.
It had a glass wall that looked out onto the conference room.
And through that glass, I watched them come in.
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.