Access to the attic is through the closet in the spare bedroom. Since that room is directly across the hall from mine, I’m quickly there. I see the same large, eyelet-covered bed, the same bench at its foot, the same dresser. And the closet. Its door is open to a tangle of hangers collected over the years, lit now by the attic light falling through the open hatch. Bisecting its beam, the stairs slant to a point just inches above the wood floor. These stairs, too, are wood, and while they’re secured by a metal frame and therefore sturdy, they are narrow. I understand why Dad lost his footing. Lord knew we all had done it once or twice.

Several books lie scattered at the foot of the stairs. They are blue leather and vaguely warped, but as familiar to me as the old camera in my room.

“Lawyer’s Diaries,” I tell Joy. Crouching, I finger the once bright, now dull lettering on the front. “Dad wrote in them every night.”

Joy squats beside me and lifts one. “1996. Crazy.” She flips it open.

I flip it shut. “Confidential.”

Her eyes meet mine, her face an adorably bemused where-did-that-come-from mask. “Seriously? After so long? Like I’ll recognize names—or even understand what’s in there? What is in there?”

“I don’t know. I never saw. Touch Thomas Aldiss’s diaries, and he swatted you away. And not just me. Any of us.”

“State secrets,” Joy intones with the drama of a girl who has read a thriller or two. “Classified information.”

“Nothing as glamorous as that,” says Anne from the door of the room. She has pulled her hair into a ponytail but looks only marginally more conventional. The burgundy streak snakes back from her left temple. “There are dates, appointment reminders, notes about clients when he was in private practice and about cases when he was on the bench.”

“So you’ve looked inside them?” Joy asks.

“Oh yeah.” My sister has one hand on the door frame and appears to feel no guilt. “He allowed us to look. He just chose which pages we could see, and he had to do that. I mean, legally. He couldn’t show us everything. What kind of lawyer would do that? What kind of judge?” To me, she says, “You remember him as a disciplinarian, but he wasn’t always so strict.”

I’m thinking that Margo would have something pithy to say about that, when Anne tells Joy, “Papa loves music. Will you go down and play the piano for him?”

Joy laughs. “On what?”

There was a silent beat. “Duh.”

“I didn’t see a piano.”

“You didn’t look past the front rooms. Try the conservatory.”

I’m the one who laughs now. “The conservatory? That’s rich. Joy, she means the sunroom, out the door at the back of the living room. And she’s right. He’ll love it.”