The story I grew up with was simple. My father died of pancreatic cancer when I was three years old. His name was Nicholas. I had two photographs of him — one of him holding me as an infant, one of him standing next to my mother at their wedding in 1991. He had been, my mother told me, a good man. Quiet. A mechanical engineer. He had loved me the way fathers in photographs love children in photographs — with an expression that does not fully exist anywhere except in those specific images. My mother had never remarried. She had raised me alone, in the same house in Des Moines where I was born, and the story of Nicholas had been the emotional architecture of my entire childhood. I wore his watch on my left wrist the day I got my PhD. I had, for the last five years, been writing a novel that was dedicated to him. And at a Christmas Eve dinner table, my twenty-three-year-old cousin — the cousin who had consistently, every family gathering, been the person who said the wrong thing — said the thing that was apparently not wrong.