He Was Never Overseas Part 6

The police came back three days later. Two officers this time.

Different faces. A laptop between them instead of a notepad. They asked me to

show them everything — the messages, the photos, the timestamps I’d saved obsessively

in folders labeled by date and platform. They didn’t interrupt while I scrolled. That scared me more

than if they had. One of them leaned closer to the screen. “Can you scroll back to the first

message again?” I did. They exchanged a look. “We ran the chat

logs through cyber,” the officer said carefully. “Cross-referenced time stamps,

routing paths, compression signatures.” I waited. They didn’t soften it.