"Why are they in your ledger?" he asked, voice thin.
She tilted her head the way she had in the video. "They asked," she said. The voice was not her mouth but the whispering track itself. "We don't take what we do not need. We keep what keeps you walking."
Weeks later, the file name rippled across message boards and torrents, stripped of its sanatorium coordinates but married to a thousand theories. People argued: art project, hoax, government cover-up. Each viewer took away what they were not ready to carry. Ravi stopped reading the threads. He visited his mother and, for the first time in years, sat across the table and let the silence stretch until she filled it with a single, soft sentence: "We did what we had to." He reached across the table and put his hand over hers.