V for Vendetta sits at the very top of my movie list, and if you have seen it, you can probably guess the scene that put it there. Evey is locked in a cell, head shaved, being broken one interrogation at a time. Then a letter reaches her, written on toilet paper by a prisoner named Valerie. The letter comes from the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd; the film adapts and condenses it, then gives it a voice that has stayed with me for years.

Valerie was an actress. She fell in love with Ruth, and for three years their London flat smelled of roses. As she remembers it:

For three years I had roses, and apologised to no one.

Then America's war grew worse and eventually came to London. After that, there were no roses anymore. Not for anyone. The regime made being different dangerous. They took Ruth while she was out buying food, and it was not long until they came for Valerie.

Now Valerie sits in a cell writing her life story on toilet paper for a stranger she will never meet. She tells that stranger about Sarah, Christina, her parents, Ruth, and the best years of her life. Then she closes by telling that stranger she loves them.

The letter does not reach Evey by accident. V later tells her that Valerie wrote it just before she died, and that he delivered it to Evey as it had been delivered to him. The letter becomes more than a confession. It becomes a handoff, one person's last act of integrity entrusted to another.

The center of the letter is a single idea:

Our integrity sells for so little, but it is all we really have. It is the very last inch of us. And within that inch, we are free.
We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Everything else can be taken from a person. That inch can only be surrendered. The regime took her freedom, her future, and Ruth, but it never got that inch. She faces death with it intact, apologising to no one.

A lot of that is simply true. There is something in a human being that no power on earth can take. No one can take your conscience by force. You can only give it away. And Valerie is right about what it is worth. The world will buy it from you for almost nothing, and it is still worth more than everything you own. Jesus asked the same question a different way: what can a man give in exchange for his soul (Mark 8:36-37)?

Even the villains in this story teach something. The government wraps itself in the language of faith while it tortures people. When you see that, do not blame the faith. Blame the people wearing it as a costume. Anyone cruel to a person made in the image of God is showing you who they really serve, and it is not God.

But the letter can only carry its hope so far. Valerie hopes the stranger who finds her letter escapes that place. She hopes the world turns and that things get better. But by her own words, every last inch of her will perish except one. At first, that final inch seems to survive only as ink on paper in a stranger's hands. If death gets the last word, her integrity is beautiful, and it is also doomed.

But the film does not let death have the last word. V carries the letter forward. Evey receives it. What Valerie guarded in a cell becomes strength in another person. The inch survives not because Valerie escaped death, but because what she refused to surrender outlived her.

The gospel agrees with Valerie about the inch and disagrees about the ending. Jesus said that whoever clings to his life will lose it, and whoever hands his life over to Him will keep it (Mark 8:35). So the inch is real. The question is whether there is anyone you can trust to hold it.

Valerie guarded hers in isolation, all the way to the end, and I honor her for it. But listen to her hope again. The world turning. Things getting better. Roses again. That is almost a prayer, and there is a promise that answers it, from the One who makes all things new. Because of the resurrection, the last inch is not a keepsake. It is a seed.

Watch the scene if you never have, or even if you have. And if the story grabs you the way it grabbed me, there is a fan shrine to the book that has been maintained since 1997, which tells you I am not the only one this letter impacted. Then ask yourself the letter's real question, the one Valerie answered in that cell: who holds your last inch?