And the woman I carried away from a burning car never treated the rescue like a debt she could repay with a favor.
She did something better.
She looked at what had happened after I left her on that roadside, followed the evidence, and used the authority she already possessed.
Months later, I drove that same mountain corridor again.
The damaged guardrail had been replaced.
There was no trace of the sedan in the ravine below.
Traffic moved normally through the curve as if nothing unusual had ever happened there.
I slowed anyway.
For a second I remembered the rain, the gasoline, the locked seatbelt, and the heat on my back as the car exploded.
Then I remembered Wednesday morning: Jackson at the head of the table, saying there was no witness and no documentation.
He had been wrong about both.
The witness had survived.
And I had learned long before that week that documentation only looks powerless while the wrong person controls the drawer.
