Daniel’s file was the size of a small book.
That was the first thing Adrian told me about it afterward, not the contents, not the conclusions, but the physical weight of the thing when Daniel set it on the desk. Like he needed me to understand that whatever came next had been earned. That it was not a theory or a suspicion or a thread someone had been careful with. It was the whole picture, documented and cross-referenced and delivered in the kind of folder that said: this is over.
I was not in the office when it happened. I was in the hotel with Ethan, who had decided that the morning after a serious family conversation was an excellent time to reorganize his structural engineering books in order of what he called narrative tension, which was apparently a thing books about bridges could
