Chapter 2: The Contents of the Envelope

The file ran to nine pages.

I read them twice through before I permitted myself to think about what I was holding, which is a habit I acquired in Afghanistan when the situation was bad enough that thinking too early was its own form of surrender. Read first. Understand later. Keep the hands moving.

The pages were written in Holmes's compressed, idiosyncratic script — the hand he reserved for case notes rather than correspondence, which was smaller and faster and entirely without consideration for any reader but himself. I had learned to parse it over seven years the way one learns a dialect: through immersion and error and the gradual accumulation of context. In the early days I had sometimes required twenty minutes with a single paragraph. By the end I could read him almost as quickly as print.