I kept my 2019 staff statement in the same accordion folder where I file old tax returns, which should tell you something about how I'd filed it in my own head too, a piece of paperwork, not a confession. March 14, a Tuesday, I pulled it out on the shop counter and read it next to Vera for the first time since I'd signed it.
It was four sentences long. I reported to the receiving door at the scheduled transfer time, I processed the intake checklist for the named individual, I observed no irregularities in the transport documentation, I completed my shift without further incident. Dry, procedural, the kind of language that makes a day disappear.
"That's it?" Vera said. "That's the whole statement?" She turned it over like there might be more on the back, the way you check a receipt for a second page you know isn't there.
"That's it," I said. "Nobody asked me more than that. There wasn't an investigation yet, not really, just an incident report they collect whenever anything happens on a shift, routine or not."
She read it again, slower this time, her finger moving under each line. "You said you observed no irregularities in the documentation. But you told me yesterday you signed before you confirmed the attachment was there."
"I know what I told you."
"So which one's true?"
I didn't have a clean answer, and I'd had three and a half years to build one. "Both, in a way that doesn't help anybody. I didn't see an irregularity because I didn't look long enough to see one. That's not the same as there not being one."
Vera set the statement down and looked at me for a while without saying anything, and I made myself hold still for it instead of filling the silence the way I usually do. Then she said, quieter than I expected, "You know what my first thought was, when Reyes told you what happened. My honest first thought."
"Tell me."
"Good. That's what I thought when I heard the news. Good, something finally caught up to her." She said it flatly, not proud of it, just reporting it the way she'd report a part number. "My mother was already gone. I couldn't call her. I sat there wishing I could tell her, and I didn't stop to ask what I was wishing she'd hear."
"I'm not going to argue you out of that," I said. "I don't think I get to. But I'm not going to sit here and call it deserved either, Vera. Eleven murders don't make a twelfth one justice. They just make it a twelfth one."
She didn't flinch from that, but she didn't agree out loud either. "Easy to say when it's not your family's eleven."
"You're right, it is easier. I'm not telling you how to feel about her. I'm telling you I can't put my name on a sentence that treats what happened to her as a fair trade for what she did to your brother. Those aren't the same kind of math."
She was quiet again, and I watched her decide whether to push on that or let it sit, and she let it sit, which from Vera is its own kind of answer. Then she picked the statement back up. "Fine. Different question. Why didn't you write any of this down back then? The uncertainty. The twenty minutes you told me about."
This was the part I'd been circling since Tuesday night, the part I'd driven past on my way to telling her everything else first. "Because I was eighteen months from a pension, and an incomplete handover with my signature on it was the kind of thing that gets you a hearing, not a gold watch. Nobody asked me if I was sure. I answered the question they asked, not the one that mattered."
"That's a lawyer's answer, Ellis."
"It's an accurate one. That's the part I can't get past. Everything in that statement is true. I just left out the one thing that would've made somebody ask a harder question, and I left it out on purpose, and I've been calling that caution for three and a half years instead of what it actually was."
Vera folded the statement back along its old creases, slow, like she was deciding how much weight to put on each fold. "So when you came to me acting like this was about the Custody Service covering something up, that was only half of it."
"Yeah."
"The other half is you covering for yourself."
"Yeah," I said again, because there wasn't a version of that sentence I could soften without lying to her a second time, and I'd just spent ten minutes telling her I was done doing that.