And I had spent all that time believing I’d failed the one person who, dying, had thought only of clearing my name.

Reeves sat with me in that room, not talking, just there, the way you sit with someone whose grief has finally found the floor.

I was grateful for it in a way I couldn’t have said out loud.

I asked to keep the page.

They let me.

I have it still — a photocopy, the classified markings redacted, three lines of my friend’s last words in a clerk’s flat typeface.

For a while I couldn’t decide whether it was the cruelest thing I owned or the kindest.