What happened is that my disclosure went from Deborah Quist to the agency’s designated agency ethics official, and from there, the same week, as a referral, to the office of the inspector general, which is an independent statutory body inside the agency that does not answer to my chain of command and that I had never in eleven years had a single interaction with.

The referral generated a case number on the twenty-third of September.

And then, for five weeks, nothing happened at all.

That is the part nobody prepares you for.

I had blown up my own life in forty hours and made a referral about my own husband and had my warrant suspended, and then I sat on the second floor doing records disposition for five weeks in complete silence, and I have never in my life been worse company.

Special Agent Marisol Tejeda called on the twenty-ninth of October.