My Wife Woke in a Hospital Bed, Saw the Tattoo I’d Hidden for Four Years, and Instead of Asking Me to Make Them Disappear, She Said the Six Words That Set Me Free: “No Bodies. Ruin Them in the Light.”

Documented, verified, redundant, unglamorous information — the receipt, the record, the recording, the copy stored in three places.

Fear ends when you leave the room.

Information stays in the room forever.

So in the years of dismantling my old world, I had traded one for the other, deliberately, method by method — had rebuilt whatever remained of the network’s genius for knowing things and pointed it at truth instead of terror.

And that is why, when Rosalind Harrington finally forced my two worlds into the same hospital corridor, I did not answer her with the old instrument.

I did not need to threaten anyone.