As M must face early on when a traitor is found by her side, in a world where good and evil become more defined by personal gain than any sort of pre-existing standard, trusting anyone with any sort of personal stake in matter becomes difficult. As she tells Bond, she needs to know that he is not just out there blindly seeking vengeance and ready to kill anyone who gets in his way. And as it begins to look like he may be doing nothing other than just that, even she struggles to know whether her favorite agent is actually her ally or her enemy.

Of course, central to it all is Bond himself. And as M fears, central to his formula for friends and enemies is none other than Vespa. If they had a hand in her death, they are enemies. If they didn't, they might be friends. But between his uncertainty over whether Vespa really loved him or simply played him, and his own feelings of guilt surrounding her death, Bond's questions of trust and responsibility become almost more critical than anyone else's.

Although all that surrounds Bond is essentially a sea of gray, as Bond continues to push for the truth, what he finds is that right and wrong and friends and enemies still do exist. But what Bond reveals is that his need to make things right is almost more about granting freedom to the innocent than punishing the guilty. Yes, Bond does bring a few thugs to justice, but even more importantly, he is able to once again trust those he knows to be his friends. In Mathis, he finds a friend eager to help him and a push to believe that it is not just him against the entire world. "It's something to admit you're wrong," he tells Bond. "We forgive each other. Vespa, she gave you everything. Forgive her. Forgive yourself." And in the end, more powerful than identifying any of the wrongdoers in the whole scenario, and the key that finally seems to free Bond and give him the solace he seeks, is his recognition that Vespa's death was not about her betrayal or his guilt but the love that they shared

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