The court order arrived at Marcus Reyes's desk at 9:14 a.m. in a manila envelope stamped with considerably more bureaucratic weight than its contents seemed to warrant.
He sat with it unopened for eleven minutes, his coffee going cold beside it, aware in some superstitious corner of his mind that once he broke the seal there would be no version of this case that stayed theoretical.
He opened it. That was the job.
Three pages of unsealed identity records, cross-referenced by the state under his expedited request.
A name change petition filed ten years ago by a legal guardian on behalf of a minor. A new Social Security number issued the same year — the quiet bureaucratic sleight of hand that happened more often than the public understood, usually for exactly the reason it had happened he
