She tells him on Saturday, sitting on the warm bench rather than standing at the gate, because she wants, this time, to say it without the adrenaline of arrival still in her voice.

“I got a formal notice,” she says. “Unauthorized access. It’s on my file now. Permanently, as far as I can tell.”

Elias doesn’t say he’s sorry, which she’s grateful for — she’s had enough people be sorry at her this week, Celia twice, Petra once in a look that didn’t need words. He asks instead: “What does it cost you, practically?”

“I don’t fully know yet. Nothing today. But it’s the kind of thing that shows up later — a promotion I don’t get and never hear why, a transfer I’m not considered for. It attaches to me quietly and then one day it’s the reason for something and nobody says so.”

“That’s the design,” he says. “I know it well. It’s not punishment. Punishment would be honest about what it’s doing.”

She looks at the row, still holding, though she can see, if she looks carefully, the second flush starting its own slow decline behind the third that’s beginning. Nothing in this bed stays only one thing.

“Was it worth it,” she asks, not quite a question, more a thing she needs to say out loud to hear how it sounds.

“I can’t answer that for you,” he says. “I can tell you what it looks like from where I’m sitting, if that helps.”

“Tell me.”

“You are the only person at that office, in seven years, who has looked at what the model does and refused to let herself stop looking. A notice on a file is a small price for that, and I say that as someone who paid nothing at all for silence, and has carried the weight of that every day since.” He says it plainly, without self-pity, a fact rather than a confession. “You paid something. That’s not nothing. That’s the opposite of nothing.”

She sits with that.

“I don’t feel brave,” she says eventually. “I feel tired, and a little frightened, and like I want someone to tell me it stops here.”

“It doesn’t stop here,” he says. “I wish I could tell you it does.”

“I know,” she says. “I think I already knew.”

They watch the light go long across the yard, and for a while that’s the entire conversation — no more words needed, or none that would improve on what’s already been said.