Walsh visited one final time when the last remaining property evidence was ready for release. He brought no dramatic announcement, only the paperwork required to return items that were no longer needed by the court. He told Sarah that several financial recovery proceedings were still underway and that victims of the broader operation would be contacted through the appropriate legal channels. Sarah appreciated that he did not claim the case was finished simply because Graham had been sentenced.
"You always talk like you're writing a report," she told him.
"Occupational hazard," he said.
"Did you ever believe you were going to get them? Before the bike?"
Walsh thought for a moment. "I believed the evidence might lead somewhere. I didn't know when, and I didn't know who would decide he'd had enough of keeping quiet. Those are different things."
"It wasn't one person."
"No," he agreed. "It wasn't."
He gave her a copy of the documents she was entitled to receive and thanked her for the care she had taken in preserving what she knew. Sarah told him she would be happy never to give another statement in her life. Walsh smiled and said he hoped her next interesting customer was simply somebody with a broken radiator.
After he left, Sarah took a short walk to the back of the salvage yard. The bunker door was closed, the path repaired after winter rain, and the shelves inside had been reorganized so the place could return to its proper function as storage rather than an emergency refuge. The emergency lighting still worked. Sarah checked it once, recorded the inspection in her notebook, and closed the door again.
She had considered tearing the bunker down. For weeks after the siege, the sight of the hillside had made her stomach tighten, and she hated the thought of storing ordinary machine parts in the place where three people had listened to armed strangers threaten their lives. But destroying the bunker would not destroy the memory. Gradually, she understood that leaving it useful was another way of refusing to let one terrible night define everything the land could be.
An envelope arrived from Wyatt several months after his sentencing. This one was not anonymous, and the return address identified the institution where he was serving his term. Sarah carried it into the workshop and opened it while June was out delivering a part. Wyatt's handwriting was surprisingly careful for a man whose hands had once frightened people before he said a word.
He wrote about working in a maintenance program, about the discomfort of being supervised by people who were younger and far less physically imposing than he was, and about discovering that following ordinary rules was harder than giving commands. He had begun attending classes and meeting regularly with a counselor, though he made no grand claims about transformation. He said he still woke from dreams in which Graham stood beside his childhood bicycle, promising to fix it if Wyatt would stop asking questions.
"I used to think the worst thing a man could do was betray his brother," he wrote. "Now I think a man can betray himself for years by refusing to admit what his brother has become. I did that, and other people paid for it."