The renewal packet went back to Rook Harbor the same way it had come, Monday mail, except this time I was the one writing the return address by hand. Unsigned. I'd written UNSIGNED — SEE ENCLOSED LETTER across the top page in blue pen, pressing hard enough that it showed through to the back. The letter explained my refusal. The signed supplement had its own envelope, addressed to the review office.
Vera watched me seal it at the workbench, where we'd spent two weeks working toward an account that separated observed from reported from unknown. "You don't have to mail both things today," she said. "Keep the contract separate. Give yourself room to change your mind on the drive to the post office."
"I'm not going to change my mind," I said, and I meant it, though my hand wasn't entirely steady when I taped the flap down. "They're going to separate offices. But the refusal letter says I've submitted an account, and the supplement explains why I can't endorse the renewal. I don't want to send one now and leave the other sitting here until I find a reason not to mail it."
The supplement was four typed pages, with copies of my own records behind it. I'd checked my account against the diary, the verdict and sentencing summaries, the appellate filing and the January review. I said I signed the October 21, 2019 intake without confirming that the flagged attachment accompanied the file. I said I did not know whether it had been absent, or whether any failure in that handover affected placement or the death. I attributed everything I hadn't witnessed and addressed the submission to the review office's correspondence channel. I was sending it for the record, not for relief.
"Read me the last paragraph again," Vera said. "The part before the signature."
I found it and read it out loud, my own voice sounding strange to me in the empty shop. "I am not asking for immunity or a finding that I bear no responsibility. I ask that this account be retained in the administrative record concerning my conduct during intake processing on October 21, 2019, alongside, and not in place of, my original staff statement concerning that intake."
"You're not asking for anything," she said, not quite a question.
"I'm not asking to be cleared. I'm not accusing anybody of anything either, because I don't know who did what in that cellblock, and I'm done pretending in either direction that I do." I folded the pages and matched the corners twice before sliding them into the second envelope. "I'm asking for it to exist. That's all I think I'm entitled to ask for."
We drove to the Rook Harbor post office together, which wasn't necessary, but neither of us suggested I go alone. The clerk weighed both envelopes, the thick one and the thin one, and asked if I wanted delivery confirmation on either. I said yes to both. It cost extra and I paid it without checking the total, which Vera noticed and didn't comment on until we were back in the truck.
"That's the kind of thing you do when you want proof later that you did it," she said. "Not for them. For you."
"Maybe both," I said. "I don't see why it has to be only one."
She didn't argue the point. We sat in the parking lot for a minute with the engine running, not going anywhere yet, and she asked the question I'd been waiting for since the envelopes left my hands. "What happens to the contract now? Not the supplement. The actual money."
"It's gone," I said. "Returning it unsigned on the deadline date, that's a refusal, not a negotiation. Okafor told me as much on the sixteenth. There's no path back to the same number by April."
Vera looked out the windshield at the flag over the post office, hanging still in no wind at all. "Then we'd better figure out what the shop looks like without it," she said, "because I don't think either of us wants to find out by accident."
"No," I said. "We don't." I put the truck in gear, and for the first time in two weeks the thing sitting on my chest wasn't the weight of a decision still coming. It was just the ordinary weight of a bill that was now, finally, due.