They went home to quiet kitchens and dim blue screens, where headlines praised their resolve while comment sections spat their names. Some scrolled until dawn, searching for a version of events that hurt less, replaying the moment their finger pressed the button and the tally tipped. Others refused to look at any of it, clinging to briefings and memos like shields, insisting that complexity absolved them.
Yet complexity did not visit their sleep; faces did. Not the polished ones from hearings, but the imagined, uncounted lives folded into phrases like “collateral damage” and “strategic interests.” In the weeks that followed, no scandal broke, no career collapsed. But something hairline and vital had cracked. They learned how easily a story of service could become a story of harm, and how, in the quiet afterward, the loudest judgment was the one they could no longer escape from themselves.
