Then I wrote Paige a message.
A good repair begins with figuring out what actually broke.
I stared at the sentence before sending it.
It was the lesson I taught her when she was nine.
It was also what I had to remember before accusing anyone of something I could not prove.
Wednesday began with a letter pushed through my door before sunrise.
There was no stamp and no envelope.
It was a photocopy of a complaint alleging that I had harassed Lorraine Kessler for months.
The signature beneath the complaint resembled Lorraine’s, but the document was dated the previous Friday.
The complaint described Tuesday’s assault as though it had already happened.
I stood in the kitchen with the paper in my hands and felt the hairs on my arms rise.
A person had written a story about Tuesday before Tuesday arrived.
I photographed the page, saved the doorbell footage, and called Munroe.
He asked me not to touch the document further and arranged for someone to collect it.
He warned that we could not conclude who had prepared it simply because the allegations benefited one side.
I understood his reasoning, but the date had turned my quiet street into a place I no longer recognized.
At seven, Rosa called and asked me to meet her at city hall.
The communications building’s approval meeting was still scheduled for the next day.
She had discovered that the revised inspection appointment bore a digital signature assigned to me.
I had not signed it.
The signature appeared on a form authorizing provisional occupancy of an equipment space I had rejected for inadequate fire separation.
The city technology team had suspended the approval workflow and preserved the audit logs.
I thanked Rosa for doing that before anyone confronted Voss.
At eight thirty, I sat in a small conference room with the city engineer, an information-security analyst, and a deputy administrator.
The analyst explained that somebody had attempted to sign the form using an account with my name but without my usual authentication history.
The attempt came from a contractor terminal at the communications building.
The transaction had been rejected by the document system’s secondary review.
For the first time that week, a dull, practical control had done exactly what it was designed to do.
The deputy administrator asked whether the forged form was connected to my dispute with Lorraine.
I said investigators would have to decide that.
