I kept the badge because the badge was honest.

And I let everyone think the sheriff was all there was.”

He looked at me then, and I understood that he had told me this not as a confession but as an exchange — a true thing for a true thing, so that we would be standing on level ground.

He told me a little about her, too, that night, though he didn’t linger — a woman named Rose who had been sick a long time, and who had spent the last years of her life being subtly, professionally blamed for not getting better, as though her failure to recover were a character flaw rather than a disease.

The family’s doctors had a way of making the patient responsible, he said.

Not enough compliance.