She put both hands flat on the table.

“In five years, did you ever ask what the money was for?”

I opened my mouth to say the thing I had said to Rachel, to my forensics team, to the Inspector General, to my own reflection at three in the morning for four hundred and twenty nights.

*They lied to me.*

“I’d like to give you a complete answer,” I said, “and I don’t have one today.”

Adeyemi nodded slowly, and I understood — and I think she meant me to understand — that it was the first thing I had said in that room that she believed.