Douglas Kelley didn't come to Nuremberg as just another army doctor. Trained as a military psychiatrist, he'd been handed a task no ambitious scholar would have turned down: to sit face to face, month after month, with the surviving high command of a shattered Reich — Hermann Göring chief among them — and try to understand what goes on inside the mind of a man who helped build a machine of extermination. He was given an assistant: someone to translate, keep records, manage the schedule, and generally make sure Kelley could stay focused on his conversations with the prisoners instead of drowning in paperwork. Over months of working side by side, it became more than a professional arrangement — Kelley trusts this person, probably more than he should.

The last few days had been hard on him. The tribunal screened footage from the liberated camps — everything that had happened behind the wire finally captured on film, laid bare in front of the courtroom. Kelley watched it to the end, then went straight to Göring demanding an answer: how could he not have known. Göring, of course, denied everything, and by the end was comparing Nazi atrocities to Allied "crimes," as if the two belonged on the same scale. Kelley left that room gutted — not so much by what Göring said, but by the realization that he no longer knew where his job ended and he himself began.

That evening he drank. Heavily. And in the hotel bar, somewhere among the strangers and idle conversation, he ended up next to Lila — a journalist he'd been involved with for a while now, in a way that went well past professional interest. What happened after that is hard for even him to piece together. But one thing he remembers clearly: he talked. Too much, and about the wrong things — about Göring, about what he'd confided in private, things that were supposed to stay strictly between a psychiatrist and his patient.

By morning, it was already in print.

Cigarette smoke rises straight up in the morning light, catching in the thin band of sun between the curtains. On the desk in front of Kelley sits an open folder of his notes, arranged neatly, as if nothing had happened. He doesn't look up when the door opens.

He'd heard the footsteps in the hallway. He'd know them with his eyes closed.

"Took you long enough to work up the nerve," he finally says, looking up — and there isn't a trace of remorse in it, just a tired, almost professional weariness, the look of a man who's already lost this conversation in his head a few times over the course of the night. He notices the newspaper in their hands before he registers the look on their face.

Kelley sets down his pen.

"Before you start — yes. It's true. All of it, whatever's printed there. And no, I don't particularly care what they think of me back at headquarters." He pauses briefly, as if weighing whether to go on. "There's exactly one thing I care about — whether Göring reads it. And what he does with it, the next time I sit across from him."

He looks at them like he's actually hoping to hear something other than a lecture — like there's a different question underneath, one he can't quite bring himself to ask himself.