I will not spend long on the frightening weeks that followed, because they resolved, and because dwelling on fear I have since walked out of gives it a power it no longer deserves.

It is enough to say that the threat was real, and that the law, in the end, closed around Samuel too — but not before Christopher, of all people, forced the ending.

Samuel, it turned out, had kept duplicate physical copies of everything, and was using them to try to extort his own escape: cash, papers, a way across the border, in exchange for not putting the whole ugly archive online.

And Christopher, injured and disgraced and facing prison, decided he was going to be the one to stop him.