She had assembled and guarded that blue envelope, sealed in plastic, through four years when despair alone would have justified throwing it away, because some stubborn faith in her dead husband would not let her.

Nathan had not been passive.

He had put his name to a warning that cost him everything, to protect men younger than himself.

The courage in this story, all of it, belonged to a site supervisor and his widow — two people with no wealth and no power and no legal team — and the wealthy man’s entire contribution had been, at the very last moment, to stop being part of the machine that was crushing them.

To accept the title of savior would have been to steal the one thing the Prescotts still fully owned, which was the authorship of their own vindication.