And her email, which had in the ordinary course of discovery ended up in the materials turned over to Gregory Walsh’s office, contained one line of instruction to the copy center.

It read: Michael says use this version because Mom’s doctor left out the mental part.

The paper trail existed.

It always exists, in the end.

People who lie with documents forget that documents remember.

This is the great irony of the age we live in, and the thing that made my particular skills, in the end, so difficult to defeat.

My son’s generation grew up believing that everything digital is weightless and disposable, that a file can be edited and no one will know, that a message vanishes once it is sent, that the past can be quietly rewritten.