Boone's ending was quieter and, in its way, more telling. When the investigation into his signatures began, when the overtime sheets and the rewritten reports were laid out side by side in an investigator's office, Boone resigned. He did not wait for a formal finding. He submitted a short letter, stating that he was resigning for personal reasons, and he left the department after twenty-six years, under investigation, with his pension questions unresolved and his reputation, in the department, permanently marked by the signatures that had once seemed routine. Yolanda told Desmond that resignation under investigation was not an acquittal, and not a conviction, but a choice a man makes when he knows the paper will not support his version of events. Desmond thought about Boone's signature, neat and confident, at the bottom of so many pages, and he thought about his own signature on grade reports and team rosters, and about how a signature is a promise that you have read what you signed and stand behind it. A signature given carelessly, he thought, is a promise broken in advance. He did not celebrate Boone's resignation. He filed the letter's summary in the folder, and he went to practice, because the Falcons had a game that week, and a coach's work does not pause for other men's resignations.
Pruitt's ending was different. He cooperated fully, from his first call to Yolanda through the board proceedings and the investigation, answering questions, producing the notebook, explaining his entries, admitting his own silence at the pavilion and his early signature on the rewritten report, and explaining, without excuse, why he had changed his mind. The department, in its final report on the matter, commended him for the notebook, for its honesty and its detail, and for coming forward when coming forward cost him the comfortable retirement he had imagined, a retirement of quiet years and no headlines. He retired, as he had planned, but he retired as a man who had told the truth late rather than never, and that distinction, Yolanda told Desmond, mattered to the people who reviewed his record, and it mattered to Pruitt himself, who told Yolanda, in their last meeting, that he slept better now than he had in fourteen months, even though his retirement was not the one he had pictured. "I kept the book," he said, "and in the end the book kept me." Desmond, hearing those words, thought about his own Falcons logbook, still on his shelf at home, with its worn cover and its notes about boys and games, and he thought about how a book, kept true, can keep a person honest in ways that rules and supervisors sometimes cannot. He asked Yolanda to pass a message to Pruitt, a second message, simpler than the first. "Tell him he is welcome at the pavilion any time," Desmond said. "Tell him the grill will be hot, and there will be a chair for him, and no one will ask him for anything but his company." Yolanda passed the message, and Pruitt, she reported, had smiled, a real smile this time, and had said he might take Desmond up on that, when the weather turned and the season settled, because a bench at a pavilion was a good place for a retired man to sit and watch a game.