Lenora came up when I asked her to, moving slower than she had in May, the folder of her own handwritten notes tucked under one arm like she didn't quite trust the table to hold it steady for her. She didn't look at Silas once. She looked at the room, found a spot near the back where a younger woman had her phone up recording, and spoke mostly to her, as if teaching a stranger something true mattered more tonight than scoring any point. "Thirty-six people got off that plane in Northhaven," she said. "I counted them off myself, because I kept thinking, you get to go home tonight and I don't know yet if I do." She paused, folded her hands. "The rest of us stayed aboard. The ordered destination was Puerto Lumbre. The records place his jump after eight o'clock, before Red Mesa, where the pilots landed us safely. Four parachutes had been delivered, but I can't tell you from observation what he took. I felt the pressure shift and heard the stairway mechanism. I saw neither a jump nor a landing. I want to say that plainly because people keep asking me to describe a landing I never witnessed, and I won't invent one for the sake of a good story."
Someone in the audience asked the question I'd been waiting for since she sat down, whether she thought he'd survived the jump, and she didn't flinch from it, just set her jaw the way I'd seen her do once before, at my own kitchen table. "I don't know," she said. "I've had forty-five years to think about it and I still don't know, and I distrust anyone who tells you they do, including, with respect, the gentleman who made the film." A ripple went through the room at that, not quite a laugh, something closer to relief, like she'd said the thing half of them had come hoping somebody would finally say out loud.
Silas didn't flinch either, to his credit. He stood, and I watched him decide something in real time, the way you can sometimes watch a person's face settle before their mouth catches up. "Mrs. Pike is right that I don't know what happened on that plane any better than she does," he said. "But I do know what I did with eleven seconds of a nine-year-old's recorded voice, and I'm not going to let that stand corrected only in a half-empty reading room on a Saturday night." He turned to me. "I'm pulling the implication that you staged or anticipated the find. That line comes out of the narration before this film screens anywhere else. I'm postponing the Harrow Bend premiere by two weeks to recut it properly, not because the theory's wrong, but because that specific claim about you was. I was wrong to put it in your mouth."
It wasn't everything, and I'd stopped expecting everything somewhere around the third table in this exhibit. He hadn't conceded the hijacking theory, hadn't admitted the pattern he'd built from Lenora's old interviews and the crew logs was shakier than he claimed, and he certainly hadn't offered back the forty thousand dollars sitting now in neither of our ledgers. But the thing that had followed me since May, the suggestion that I'd known, that I'd performed fear for a camera that wasn't even born yet when I was nine, that thing he said out loud in front of forty people he was taking back. "Thank you," I said, and didn't reach to shake his hand, because some corrections you accept with your voice and not your grip, and this felt like one of those. Lenora reached over instead and patted my wrist once, hard, the way you'd steady someone coming down off a ladder, and said nothing at all, which from her was its own kind of applause.
The room emptied slowly afterward, people lingering at the third table reading the unresolved card like it was new again now that they'd heard both tapes, and Silas stopped by the desk on his way out, that folio of his back under his arm. "The grant's still gone," he said, not unkindly, just a fact laid down between us. "I know," I said. "I didn't come tonight to get it back." He nodded like that confirmed something he'd been wondering about me since May, and left without saying what, and I locked the front door behind the last visitor and stood for a minute in the quiet room full of folding chairs, feeling lighter than I had any right to feel over a correction that had cost me a little and fixed less than I wanted, but had still, somehow, fixed the right thing.