Osric had the journal spread across his desk again by the time Mia and Lucas arrived the next morning, both of them running on too little sleep and too much dread.
"I've been through it twice since Lucas called," he said, not looking up. "You're right that something's missing. The binding is wrong in places — pages sewn in slightly out of sequence, the kind of correction you'd make if you needed to remove something and didn't want the gap to show."
Mia leaned over his shoulder. "How many pages."
"Hard to say precisely. Three, perhaps four, scattered across different sections rather than removed together." Osric traced a finger along the binding near Josephine's entry, showing her the faint irregularity in the stitching. "Whoever did this was careful. This isn't the work of someone panic
