"Are you still?"
"Yes. But I know what I'm afraid of now, and I know what I'd be more afraid of becoming if I said nothing."
On Tuesday, November seventeenth, copies from a county finance archive arrived at Audrey's apartment. The packet included audit sheets from years before the electronic retention period. Some pages were only partly legible, and others referred to separate boxes not yet produced. Audrey read until the words blurred, rested her eyes for ten minutes, and continued. She refused Harvey's offer to come help because she wanted to complete the first review without anyone else's enthusiasm steering her attention toward the answer she hoped existed.
Around midnight, she reached a gray photocopy from March 2019. It showed card expenditures and a cross-reference to a roadside seizure, with older indexing conventions that required a separate explanatory sheet. Audrey found that sheet, compared the entry to Harvey's receipt, and went very still. The date, vehicle assignment, amount, and deputy's name aligned in a way no one had expected after the county said the older electronic records were gone.
She checked the page a second time. Then she placed it behind the last tab of her binder and closed the cover. The next scheduled deposition was Derek Lyman's, less than two days away. She would not announce what the archive appeared to establish before asking the person responsible to describe his own version under oath.
Wednesday passed in the ordinary preparatory work of litigation. Audrey checked that the purchased beer receipt was complete, that Sunil's video files corresponded to his sworn statement, and that the county purchasing-card records identified the same account used in her October second stop. She prepared questions with possible answers written beside them, including answers that might undermine her theory. She did not want to be surprised into treating disagreement as evidence of guilt.
Harvey called after dinner. "Any word from those old boxes?"
"They sent a packet. I'm still checking it."
"Did you see my name?"
She hesitated. "I found a record I want to ask Lyman about. You'll hear it at the deposition."
"You're making an old man wait to hear his own history."
"I'm making us wait until the people responsible have a chance to answer on the record. Mama would have made us finish the whole count before we said what was in the plate."
Harvey sighed. "I miss her."
"Me too. More than I know how to explain."
The next morning, November nineteenth, Audrey arrived at room B in the annex wearing a charcoal suit and a lemon-yellow blouse. Both repaired gold earrings caught the light when she turned her head. Harvey wore his dark church suit and placed Willa's recovered envelope on the table beside a photograph of his old waiver. The court reporter arranged her equipment by the window, and the camera operator checked the recording light.