All of them.”

And I meant it, but I want to be honest that in the moment I said it, I was not yet thinking clearly about what it even was — about the true scale of the human wreckage under that one signed page.

It was only later, going through the records, that the size of it landed.

Because Lucas’s family was not the only family.

That directive in Vance’s hand was one of dozens, maybe hundreds — an entire filing system of the deliberately abandoned.

Behind every one of those cold numbered folders was a household like the one Lucas grew up in: a family that had given a son or a husband or a father to the country’s service, and then, in the worst hour of their grief, had reached out to a charity built to catch exactly those families, and had been dropped, on purpose, because helping them was inconvenient to one man’s ambitions.