Instead I opened the bottom drawer of the desk, where a single black leather folder sat, its tab labeled in my own hand: Debts Paid. I dropped the unopened envelope inside and closed the drawer with a solid, final weight.

I know some people would have opened it.

Some would say I should have — that there is something cold in refusing even to read the words of a man rotting in a cell, that curiosity alone would have justified it.

But I had learned, over that year, the difference between forgiveness and freedom, and I had chosen freedom.

To open the letter would have been to give Dexter what he was reaching for: a door back into my attention, a thread still connecting us, the small ongoing power of being someone I still thought about.

I did not owe him that.