"Come in," I said.
He came in. He saw the folder in my lap. I watched his face -- the half-second of stillness that was not surprise but something adjacent to it, the specific quality of a man who has been waiting for something to arrive and has discovered it has arrived now.
He did not pretend he didn't know what he was looking at.
"How long," I said. Not how did you know -- I already knew that. "How long before you came to our apartment."
He sat down in the chair across from me. He didn't look away from my face.
"The surveillance summary is from March 2000," he said. "I found the file when I was nineteen, going through my father's papers after he had a stroke. I had not known about any of it before that."
"You were nineteen."
"Yes."
"And you kept the file."
"Yes."
I looked at him. "Why?"
"Because I wanted to understand it." He said it carefully, the way he said things that cost him something. "And because I understood, even then, that there were things in it that I might need to account for. That my family might need to account for."
I thought about Decision required in a dead man's handwriting. I thought about my mother in a photograph outside a courthouse, two months before a wet road and a single vehicle and nothing disputed.
"Did your father make a decision," I said.
The room was very quiet.
"I don't know," Dominic said. "I have believed, for twelve years, that the answer is no. That my father knew the risk and chose inaction rather than intervention -- that he told Salas to stand down and Salas acted independently." A pause. "I have not been able to prove this. Tran's investigation may find something. It may not."
I was looking at the photograph of my mother in a coat I didn't recognize, standing outside a building in the bright October light of twenty-five years ago.
"You chose me," I said. "Knowing all of this."
"Yes."
"And you said nothing."
"No."
I stood up. The folder remained on the chair where it had been sitting in my lap.
"When I came to you," I said -- my voice was even, I had made certain of that -- "in chapter seventeen. When I told you about Margaret. You sat across from this table and you said there are things about 2001 that I have known for longer than you have known me." I paused. "That was the most honest thing you said. The rest of it -- letting me discover it piece by piece, watching me build toward something you already had the foundation of --"
"I know."
"I want to know why." I looked at him directly. "Not strategy. Not liability. Why."
He was quiet for a moment that I did not fill.
"Because I needed you to find it yourself," he said. "Not because I was managing what you discovered -- because if I had handed you this folder on the first day, you would have had information. You would have had data. You are very good at data." Something in his voice was careful in a way that felt different from his usual carefulness -- exposed, somehow, without being weak. "I needed you to understand what your mother was. What I was doing. What it cost me. I could not give you that. You had to arrive at it."
"That is not your decision to make."
"No," he said. "It wasn't."
I picked up the folder from the chair. Placed it on the desk.