I forwarded the file to Cordray.

The warrants were approved just before dawn.

I played that recording only once, and then never again, but I did not need to play it twice; it lives in me now the way certain sounds do, available whenever I’m foolish enough to reach for it.

What struck me was not the cruelty.

I had, by then, made a kind of peace with the cruelty.

It was the ordinariness of their voices — two men working through the logistics of ending two lives with exactly the tone they’d have used to plan a merger, weighing my death against my father’s, sequencing them, agreeing on the percentages.