Three centimetres of window

The gash is still bleeding through the sleeve. Six centimetres is not a lot.

The window I rolled down for Pieter Viviers was three centimetres. He did not lean in. The cold-case file is being reopened and his uncle's farm in 2019 had a notebook in it. He said it the way he says a quarter-share is owed — flat, like weather.

My father was not a man who left notebooks. He left silences, and the kind of bruise you do not explain in a doorway. If he wrote anything down it was probably a list of names he owed money to, or a list of names he did not. I do not know which one I am.

He did not ask for his cut. He asked for something worse. He wanted me to know.

The case is paperwork, and paperwork can be ignored. What scares me is that I want to know what is in the notebook. I am thirty-four years old and I still want to know what my father thought was worth writing down. That is the kind of want I pack a kit for.