Someone knew.

Someone said so, in writing, eleven days in advance.

The tragedy was that a system had been carefully built to make sure that speaking up did not matter — that a warning could be filed and reclassified and buried, that the man who raised it could be overruled and then, once dead, blamed.

And so Corbin understood that the plaque was not only a memorial to Nathan.

It was an instruction to everyone who would ever read it, and a rebuke to the kind of company Corbin had inherited: that speaking up when something is not right is the bravest and most necessary thing a person can do, and that the whole measure of an institution’s decency is what happens next — whether the words are heard, or buried.