You burn the persona, the staging path, the notes, and finally the fantasy that you were only opening doors for other people. Files go first because files are where the story pretends to be clean: staged headers, careful signatures, the polite fiction that this was always “research.” You delete what you can delete. You overwrite what you cannot afford to keep. You watch progress bars pretend erasure is the same thing as innocence. Your hands shake anyway, not from drama, from the ordinary human reflex of trying to un-touch something you already touched. You remember the golden rule Mango drilled into you: *The 2022 Conti leaks happened because someone thought their private chats were safe.* You leave no chats. You leave nothing. What remains is not innocence, but it is a choice made while there was still time for it to cost you something. Maybe the cost is money. Maybe it is sleep. Maybe it is the version of Julian who could look Elizabeth in the eye without calculating what she is allowed to know. The game does not absolve you. It lets you stop before the next escalation makes stopping impossible. [[The Aftermath|See the aftermath]]