Jim came to stand beside me.

He was shaking, but he was standing, and when one of the agents approached him it was not with cuffs but with a quiet word and a card, an instruction about where to be and when, the first small sign that Sarah had been telling the truth about the different road available to a man who had been coerced and was ready to help.

I understood then, watching that small exchange, how completely Sarah had kept her word.

Two men had gotten off that plane with their names on the same crimes, and the law had already, in its first thirty seconds, begun to tell them apart — cuffs for the one who had built it, a quiet word and a card for the one who had been built upon.