Chapter 15: The Document Perry Already Handled

The document was thirty-seven pages long. I had processed it in forty-eight minutes on day two, which was fast even by my standards, and the speed was the problem — fast meant surface, meant anomaly-flagging without depth mapping, meant I had found what was missing without understanding what the missing things were pointing toward.

I knew this now. I had not known it then.

I started at the left margin of page one and I drew the thin orange line the way I always did, slow and deliberate, not reading but orienting. The voice memo ran low in my left ear. My own voice, six days ago, slightly too fast, the way I talked when I was trying to outpace my own anxiety: