I didn't sleep.
I lay in bed with the lights on because the dark felt wrong after the parking structure, and I stared at the ceiling and listened to my own breathing and read the text message four more times even though I had already memorized it.
"You're asking the wrong questions. Leave this alone... or you're next."
Somewhere between two and three AM, I stopped trying to sleep and got up and made tea and sat at the kitchen table with my notebook. I wrote down everything I had seen in the finance office. The account designation. The payment dates. The way the timing lined up with the escalating scandals. I wrote it all from memory, carefully, in the kind of detail that would survive if my notes were taken again the way the envelope had been taken.
Then I sat looking at what I had wri
