The text came at 2 a.m. like it was good news—my mother casually told me she’d sold my house while I was away, using an old legal document, and spent the money on my sister’s wedding. When I told her to stop the deal, she laughed—called me selfish, dramatic, ungrateful—and said I could “explain myself” at the family reunion.

Then he said something I think about often. “Personal pain makes some deputies reckless. For you it made the perimeter clearer.”

I looked down at the file in front of me. A witness transfer involving a prison-gang informant and his two boys, one of whom refused to eat peanut butter and considered that morally significant. “It made abstraction impossible,” I said.

“That’s one way to get promoted.”

He left before I could decide whether it was a joke.