Dominic's jaw tightened. He looked at the screen for a moment, then nodded. Continue.
The second folder: communications. Intercepted, mostly, recordings, transcriptions, emails from accounts that had since been closed. Conversations that documented not just transactions but decisions. Specifically, decisions about the people who had become problems.
I found my mother's name in the third document.
I stopped.
Dominic stopped.
I read the document. It was a communication between Ramón Salas and two members of his operation, dated February 12, 2001. The language was indirect, the specific indirection of people who had learned not to say certain things directly, but the meaning was not ambiguous. A peripheral risk had been identified. A timeline had been discussed. An approach had been agreed upon that would produce a result with no traceable connection to the organization.
March 2001.
Rainy night.
I read it twice. Then I closed that document and did not open it again. I had read it. I had confirmed what I had already understood. I did not need to read it a third time.
"Avery," Dominic said.
"I'm fine," I said.
He was quiet.
"I'm fine," I said again, and this time it was less directed at him and more directed at the part of myself that was not, in fact, entirely fine, and needed to hear it stated plainly. "I knew what it was going to say. I'm fine."
He didn't argue with it. He also didn't look away, which I was grateful for, the people who looked away when I said I was fine were the ones who were managing me, and I had never been able to bear being managed.
I moved to the third folder.
* * *
The third folder was Reyes's working files, the infrastructure of the investigation itself. Source records, interview notes, the paper trail of a man who had been methodical about his methodology. My mother appeared throughout it: not as a victim, not as an incidental figure, but as a source. Cited consistently, carefully, with the specific notation Reyes used for sources he trusted implicitly. M.C. confirms. Per M.C. M.C.'s records indicate.
I read for a long time.
My mother had spent three years providing the financial documentation that formed the backbone of Reyes's case. I had known what I was doing. I had understood the risk. There was a note from 1999, Reyes's account of a conversation, where Margaret had said, in response to a question about whether I wanted to stop: I have a daughter. That's exactly why I'm not stopping.
I sat back from the laptop.
The kitchen was very quiet. Outside, something moved on the street, a car, voices briefly, then gone. Inside: therefrigerator's low hum, the city's distant ambient noise, the sound of two people sitting with something large.
"I said I had a daughter," I said. "As the reason."
Dominic said nothing. But I felt him listening.
"I always thought..." I stopped. Started again. "I thought I died because I was in the wrong place. Because something happened. I never thought I died because I had made a choice that cost me." I looked at the screen. "I don't know which one is harder."
"Neither," he said. "The harder thing is understanding that I made the choice knowing it might cost me and made it anyway."
I looked at him.
"Because I had a daughter," he said. "Because I thought it mattered what my daughter inherited. Not just..." He paused. "Not just money. Not just a name. What the world looked like."
The room held that.
I thought about the photograph, my mother at twenty-five, laughing at something outside the frame. A woman who had looked at a dangerous thing and decided to document it because the record mattered. A woman who had decided that the world my daughter grew up in was worth the risk of trying to improve it.
I thought: I'm sorry it didn't work. I'm sorry it took this long.