She refused to let their lives be edited down to a headline and a timestamp. While others searched for a villain to point to, Tracy clung to the unremarkable moments: the way one of them hummed off-key in the shower, the chipped mug someone refused to throw away, the terrible jokes that never landed but were always tried again. These details were her protest, her chosen weapons against erasure.
With time, the interviews stopped, but her storytelling did not. In living rooms, at bus stops, over grocery carts, she slipped their names into the world like small, bright contraband. People learned to ask, to listen, to hold the silence after. Tracy understood she could not fix what had been shattered. What she could do was insist that the pieces still caught the light, that their lives remained stubbornly, beautifully whole in memory.
