EDMUND’S POV
The report landed in my inbox at 10:47 on Thursday morning.
Routine operations summary, the kind of document I received daily and reviewed with the specific efficiency of a man who had learned to extract what mattered from a page of figures in under two minutes. I had been doing this for fifteen years. The reports had a grammar to them, a predictable structure, and any deviation from that structure announced itself the way a wrong note announces itself in a familiar piece of music.
The flag was on page three.
Payment channel seven, the tributary feeding from the household administrative accounts into the secondary processing structure, had cleared seventy-two hours behind schedule. The notation beside it read: administrative review delay, resolved. Clean. Explained. The
