The two agents at the door were colleagues of mine. Holloway had sent the nearest field pair because the file Marisol had waved over a birthday cake was not mine to protect through kindness. It was evidence in an active case, subject to a chain of custody I had just been forced to break, and the protocol when compromised material is exposed is not a conversation. It is a scene. They photographed the folder on the table, the fingerprints on the pages, and the four relatives who admitted, on the spot, to having handled and read it, because they were still too indignant to understand they should stop talking.

Nobody was arrested that night. What happened instead was quieter and, for my family, worse. The exposure triggered a review that pulled every one of them into it as a matter of record. My father spent two days giving statements about how he obtained a key to a federal contractor’s home office. My mother learned that “we used a key” is not a defence that improves with repetition. And the case itself, which involved a fund my family did not know I had spent two years building toward, had to be partially resealed and reassigned, which cost the office months and cost me a role I had earned.