She hadn’t known his name until now and in a way, she wished she hadn’t. Now he was real, named and dated, he had existed if only for a short while, but he had existed, and tears welled again. Annoyed that her emotions now seemed to lie just under the surface, she brushed her tears away and was about to close the Bible when she realized she recognized the printed, strong block letters tilting slightly to the left. While her father may not have cared to record the event of the birth of his children, her grandfather apparently had.

With a sigh, Addison set the Bible aside and grabbed the next in the row, expecting by its fairly unblemished condition that it had belonged to her grandfather, but when she opened it to the page marked with the red silk, her eyebrows drew together. She had no idea who Samuel and Cordelia Kane were, but when she looked at the list of births and saw her grandfather’s name, she smiled.

Xavier had never talked about his parents or spoken of his wife. Like Addison, his world revolved around the present, not the past. There had been a few times when Addison was young and inquisitive when she asked about her grandmother, but dismissed with a wave of her grandfather’s knobby hand, eventually she stopped asking.

Addison had never thought herself to be a curious person. She had the passion it took to learn, investigate, and explore anything that had to do with business, but when it came to everyday life, to the rooms in her home or the cars in her garage, she had always doubted she possessed the gene containing curiosity. However, intrigued by the information the Bibles may contain, she put aside the volume belonging to Samuel Kane and studied the ones remaining. Having already been proven wrong that condition determined age, Addison chose a different tack. Noticing that one stood out among all the others, its height and girth much larger than the rest, she pulled the Bible from the shelf. Misjudging its weight, it immediately slipped from her fingers and when it hit the floor, a wad of papers that had been lodged in its pages scattered across the library.

“Shit!” she said, and letting out an exaggerated sigh, Addison knelt down to clean up the mess.

With its rounded corners and cracked spine, Addison had assumed it was one of the older Bibles, but as she began gathering the papers on the floor, she noticed the same bold, block letters covering every sheet. Curious to see what her grandfather had written, Addison scooped up the Bible and notes, tipped a bit more scotch in her glass, and settled back for a read.