I spread everything across my kitchen table at midnight.
The photographs. The handwritten note. My notebook with two weeks of observations, interview fragments, and questions I had written down and not yet answered. My laptop is open to a timeline I have been building since I got home, every event in order, every date confirmed.
The note sat in the center of it all.
*Look closer. Someone wanted you to publish them.*
I had read it so many times that the paper had developed a slight crease from where I kept folding and unfolding it. Six words that had rearranged everything I thought I understood about the last two weeks.
I had not told Marcus about the envelope.
That decision had happened quietly, somewhere between the police station sidewalk and my car, without a dramatic internal deb
