The boy told him to keep moving and find a firefighter.
Theo reached the courtyard with the others and never saw the boy again.
Jessica began to sob.
Daniel could not comfort her through a screen, and he did not want to speak over Theo’s account.
Mara paused the interview and asked whether Theo wished to continue.
He said he did, but only if everyone understood that he had spent years doubting his memory.
During the original interviews, investigators suggested he might have confused the fire with a drill that occurred two weeks earlier.
An attorney told his parents that repeated questioning would harm his recovery.
His family eventually moved away.
“Did anyone ever pay you to stay silent?”
Mara asked.
Theo considered the question carefully.
His mother had received money from a counseling fund, he said, but she believed it was part of the settlement.
No one had explicitly instructed him not to speak.
He remembered, however, that a man visited their home when he was eighteen and warned that reopening the case could affect the privacy of families who had accepted compensation.
The man carried a business card with the Hale name.
Mara asked for the card only if Theo still possessed it.
He did not.
He had thrown it away years earlier because he wanted the case to stop following him.
There was no shame in that, Mara told him.
Theo looked relieved enough to continue.
He described a second detail from the passage: a metal door with a round window, behind which he saw stacked chemical drums.
He could not read their labels.
The room smelled sharply of cleaning fluid.
Daniel had assumed the van photograph related to the movement of supplies after the fire.
Now he wondered whether the van carried materials that should never have been stored near occupied rooms.
He stopped himself from saying it aloud.
The interview had given them a witness account of a passage, keys, and a broken bell.
It had not established a cause of the fire or Richard’s role.
After the call Jessica asked Theo if she could send him a photograph of Peter from before the program.
Theo said yes.
He wanted to remember his friend laughing by the lake rather than only as a shadow in a smoke-filled corridor.
Jessica thanked him without asking for absolution.
She understood that their family had not been the only one waiting for answers.
A few days later Mara received an update from the document conservator.
