The final statement session came in the second week of October, in the same cold room, but this time with a different man, a clerk named Dowd who typed while I talked instead of writing by hand, and who seemed to want the whole thing finished before his lunch.
He started reading from notes that weren't mine. Prisoner states she elected to remain behind due to reservations about the escape plan, he read, and I stopped him before he'd finished the sentence.
That isn't what happened, I said. I didn't elect anything. I tried to get through the opening in my cell and couldn't. It had given before, but that night it held fast. Write that.
Dowd sighed through his nose but typed it, reading each line back to me as he went, and I made him strike two more phrases that softened failure into choice before I'd sign anything with my name on it.
When we reached the part about the recovered letters, he asked what the Bellamy girl's note had said, the one in the tin, and I told him the truth of that one too. It was a farewell, I said. She thanked me for things I'd done for her sister and for her. She didn't say where they were going. She didn't promise anything.
He asked if that was the only correspondence I'd had with Tess Bellamy, and here my mouth went dry in a way it hadn't through any of the rest of it.
There was a second note, folded small, that Tess had pressed into my hand two days before they left, words meant only for me, nothing about routes or tides or any plan a searcher could use. I didn't see how handing it over would find three missing women, and I saw clearly how it would strip the last private thing I had left of her.
Yes, I said. Just the one in the tin. Dowd didn't look up from his typewriter, didn't seem to weigh the lie at all, and some part of me understood that was its own kind of warning, how easy it had been to say.
He finished the page, rolled it out, and had me sign at the bottom in triplicate, then peeled off the thin, ink-smeared carbon and slid it across to me almost as an afterthought. Yours to keep, he said. Regulation.
I folded it along its own crease lines and put it in my coat pocket, feeling the paper's particular dry crackle against my palm, the exact sound it would still make seventeen years later in a shoebox under spare blankets.
Walking back, I told myself the omission was a kindness to no one but me, that it changed nothing about what the investigators needed to know, that a note with no destination and no promise could not possibly matter to a search already circling empty water.
I believed that the way you believe anything you need to be true in October of a year you can't yet see the whole shape of, which is to say completely, and without the slightest suspicion of how long that belief would have to hold.