I had spent ten years being the keeper of this thing, and now, at last, it belonged to the law, to the slow and proper machinery that exists precisely so that ordinary people do not have to become avengers.

I had gathered nothing myself; I had only kept safe what Julian gathered.

I gave them the truth he had assembled, whole and intact, exactly as he had left it in my keeping.

What they built with it, the charges and the warrants and the reckoning, was theirs to build, and I was content, more than content, to let them.

I had seen, up close, what happens to a person who tries to be the whole system by themselves, who takes the entire weight of justice onto their own shoulders because they do not trust anyone else to carry it.