Question

Read the following passage carefully:

Tobias held the magnifying glass over the map’s fading coastline, where the ink had flaked away into tiny brown scales. The map was supposed to be a guide to the safe harbors of the southern peninsula, but to Tobias, it was a ledger of his father’s failures. Every jagged line representing a hidden reef corresponded to a ship that had never returned to their family's dock, each loss quietly eroding the old man’s sanity until there was nothing left but a collection of yellowed charts and unpaid debts. Tobias’s sister, Martha, had urged him to sell the collection to the town archivist, arguing that the past was a weight they could no longer afford to carry. Yet, as Tobias traced the contour of a harbor that existed only as a surveyor's hope, he felt a strange, cold satisfaction. He did not seek to salvage their family's reputation, nor did he believe the maps held any secret wealth. Rather, in the meticulous documentation of these disasters, he found a bizarre sort of comfort—a proof that their ruin was not a matter of sudden, cruel fate, but a logical sequence of calculated risks that had simply failed. To part with them would be to admit that the storms had won, whereas keeping them allowed him to pretend he was the curator of a grand, tragic design.

Which of the following best describes the primary motive behind Tobias's decision to keep his father's maps?