The report could not determine whether every phone call Elena made had been deliberately blocked.

Some records no longer existed.

Priya warned us not to pretend certainty where the evidence was incomplete.

But the documented actions were more than enough to explain how both of us had come away believing the other wanted silence.

Elena received the acknowledgment she requested and copies of the relevant records.

After reading them, she cried quietly in Marianne’s office.

She said she had spent years questioning whether she had imagined the contempt in those letters, whether she had somehow provoked it by speaking too plainly.