By September of 2021 I had a lawyer of my own, a quiet, careful man named Russo who did not raise his voice and did not pretend he liked what I told him. The founder's trial was approaching, and the federal prosecution had sent word that investors from the 2013 and 2014 rounds might be asked to describe what they'd been shown.
I sat at my kitchen table one whole Saturday with every piece of correspondence I'd kept since 2013, folders Amos didn't know I still had, and I wrote down, in order, exactly what had happened inside that building the day Gideon Vale walked us through it.
I wrote: a finger was pricked. The technician collected blood in a cartridge and carried it through a steel door. The door closed. Several minutes passed during which I saw nothing. A printed slip came back through a slot with numbers on it. I did not see the sample processed. I inferred that it had been, because I wanted to, and because Gideon wanted me to, and those two wants had agreed with each other completely.
I read that paragraph back twice before I let myself write the next one, which was harder. I had told Amos Dacre, in October of 2013, that I watched them run a sample start to finish and that the machine worked. That statement was not an inference stated badly. It was invented, in full, after the fact, to answer a question I did not want to leave unanswered.
Russo read both paragraphs without changing his expression, which I'd come to understand was his particular kindness. "This is a clean, accurate account," he said. "Keep it that way. Don't let anyone soften it for you, including yourself, between now and whenever someone asks."
"Even the second paragraph?" I asked, meaning the part about Amos.
"Especially the second paragraph," he said. "That's the part that's actually yours."
He told me, separately, that Mara Kestrel's case was proceeding on its own track, a different courtroom, a different calendar, not joined to Gideon's trial the way I'd half assumed it would be when I first heard both their names in the same indictment coverage. Whatever the court decided about her would answer her question, not mine or Amos's.
I sent the account to Russo for appropriate handling, whatever that meant procedurally, and felt something loosen in my chest that I hadn't expected, a kind of relief at having finally written the true sentence down somewhere outside my own head, where it couldn't quietly reshape itself into something more comfortable over another winter.
But I didn't call Amos that night, or any night that week, to tell him the account existed, or what it said, or that I had known exactly how to write it the moment someone besides him asked me to be precise. I told myself it wasn't relevant yet, that it was for the court, not for supper conversation.
That was the lie I was still telling in September of 2021, smaller than the first one but built from the same material: that truth could be sorted into the kind owed to a lawyer and the kind owed to a friend, and that I got to decide which drawer each kind went in, and for how long.