But for the unlucky ones, that same trust becomes the exact mechanism of their destruction, because a person who has kept no copies, kept no records, kept no independent evidence of their own life, is a person entirely at the mercy of whoever chooses to rewrite their story.

My father understood that trust and copies are not opposites.

You can love someone completely and still keep a copy — not because you expect betrayal, but because the cost of being wrong about betrayal is so catastrophic, and the cost of keeping a copy is so small.

He was not a paranoid man.

He was a man who had done the arithmetic, and understood that a lifetime of unnecessary copies is a trivial price to pay for the one copy that turns out to save your life.

I did not keep copies out of suspicion of Derek.