Lena Tao had written a letter to her son.
I sat there and stared at it on the screen for a long time without opening it. I saw her handwriting, the same careful script from the old alumni photo. The date in the corner, three days before she died. The way the letter started with his name, Adrian, she wrote it, knowing that these words might be the last thing she ever gave him.
I closed the folder and thought about what it meant that this letter existed inside an encrypted file, buried in the same structure that had destroyed my father’s life. I thought about the fact that I had found it. And I thought about what I was supposed to do with it.
It was evidence. Everything in that folder was evidence. I had spent three years chasing this story, and I had a job to do.
But it was also a lette
