Kelvin Mensah took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders, over the torn dress and the scar.

“Why didn’t you tell me everything?” he asked, quiet.

“Because secrecy kept people alive,” I said.

“But silence nearly cost me you.”

It was the truest and hardest thing I said all night, and it was aimed as much at myself as at him.

For five years I had told myself that the sealing of my record was a matter of duty — that surviving members of the network were still out there, that lives depended on my old identity staying buried, that I had no right to endanger an operation for the sake of my own marriage.