Sleep didn’t come.
I sat on the floor with my back against the bed frame until well past two in the morning, phone screen casting pale light across my hands, reading the photographed pages over and over until the words stopped looking like words and started looking like a puzzle with one piece still missing.
The settlement letter was careful. Whoever had drafted it knew exactly how much to say and how much to leave out. No names. No case number. No firm letterhead. But the structure was deliberate, the language too specific to be generic boilerplate. Someone had written this document for one exact purpose and then scrubbed it of everything that could make it traceable at first glance.
At first glance.
I zoomed in on the second page, bottom third, where the margins were slightly narrowe
