Elise raised her glass. “To people who keep records.”
Helena added, “And to people who finally read them.”
We laughed, gently, because the joke held more truth than any of us wanted to admit.
After everyone left, I washed the dishes and stood for a while by the window. Somewhere in Kentucky, Mara rested beneath a stone bearing her name. In the city, the Mercer Group’s factories would open again at dawn. And my father’s lessons remained, not in his bank accounts but in the questions I had learned to ask.
Nolan once told me nobody was coming to rescue me. He was right about one thing: there had been no sudden miracle, no single hero who made the nightmare disappear. There had been an attorney who kept pushing, a detective who listened, a sister who never stopped searching, workers who saved records, and people willing to revise what they thought they knew.
