Julian's email landed Friday morning with a subject line that read Time-Sensitive, which by then I'd come to recognize as a genre rather than a fact. The contact, he wrote, had a departure booked for Tuesday and would not commit to another conversation after that, not with him, not with anyone, unless something concrete moved before the archive evening.
I read it twice at my own kitchen table, the same table where I'd read every warning he'd sent me since the preview, and noticed that the shape of my fear hadn't changed even though everything underneath it had. Recent. Your son. Those words still landed somewhere low in my chest no matter how many photographs turned out to belong to 1998 instead.
I let myself sit with that fear until I finished my coffee. Then I wrote back. I did not offer the eighteen thousand dollars or ask him to produce the man by Tuesday. I asked for the contact's own words, directly, without Julian's framing. Before sending, I deleted a sentence asking whether he understood what this was doing to me. He knew enough about that already. In its place I asked him to forward any original message with its date intact; if the account had only been spoken, he could ask the person to write it down. I read those requests aloud to make sure neither contained a promise to pay.
His reply came faster than I expected, and shorter. He explained that the contact wished to remain anonymous until funds were secured, that direct communication wasn't something he could arrange on this timeline, that he was only the messenger trying to protect a fragile opportunity on my behalf. I read fragile opportunity and thought of how many fragile opportunities had passed through my mailbox over twenty-seven years, every one of them fragile in a direction that happened to require my money first.
I offered him something instead of money. I told him I would preserve whatever he could send me, in his own words or the contact's, clearly labeled as an unverified submission, filed with Inez's archive alongside everything else connected to Owen's case. No publicity condition. No deadline of mine attached to it. Just a place for it to exist honestly, whenever he was ready to produce it.
He did not send a firsthand statement. He sent instead a longer email about the difficulty of these situations, the sensitivity required, his own years of experience with families in positions like mine, and I read all of it without finding a single sentence that was actually the contact speaking. I printed the whole exchange and wrote the date at the top in my own hand, the way I'd started doing with everything that mattered now.
I did not write imaginary beside the printout, because I didn't know that, and pretending to know things I didn't was exactly the habit I'd spent the month unlearning. I wrote instead: no firsthand statement received as of April 11. It was a smaller sentence than the fear deserved and a truer one than the fear would have chosen for itself.
I filed the pages in the folder Inez had started for the benefit dispute and closed it. Tuesday was still ahead; Julian's deadline had not expired. I could not stop it approaching, but I could stop treating it as an instruction. The eighteen thousand dollars remained mine, and the appeal's separate reward remained untouched. I left my email address available for information and turned off the sound that announced new messages.