There is a specific arithmetic that grief does to a person, and mine had been running for a year and a half.

Every good memory of Gabriel had been converted, one by one, into evidence against me.

The time he’d covered for my mistake on a night sortie — proof he was the better pilot, the one who should have lived.

The way he’d trusted my calls in the air without question — proof I’d betrayed that trust at the end.

I had taken the finest friendship of my life and turned it into a case for the prosecution, with myself as the only defendant, and I had been losing that trial every day for eighteen months.

To be told, in a bare room in Spain, that the whole trial had been built on a fabrication — that the central fact had been a lie sold by the man in the next cell — did not feel like relief, not at first.