I asked her to contact Tran directly.

She replied that she had already done so but feared her employer would destroy records before the police could obtain them.

I told her not to remove or copy anything unlawfully and to follow the detective’s instructions.

She thanked me, then asked a question that kept me awake that night.

“Did your pool have a maintenance problem before this happened?”

I replied that it had not.

“Then someone may have put the wrong location in the draft report,” she wrote.

I forwarded the messages to Tran.

The next day, Kira called from a public telephone near a bus station.

Her voice shook as she described a draft risk memo prepared for Atlas.

The memo identified my property as a potential source of blue tracer particles found in the neighborhood drainage system.

It recommended immediate access through my yard to investigate and control a supposed migration route.

“But the memo was dated before I found the particles,” I said.

“I know.”

She fell silent.

“That’s why I asked about your maintenance.”

I felt a sudden, sick understanding.

The stain was not merely a tactic to frighten me.

It might have been placed to support a document that already claimed to know what would be found.

Kira said a supervisor had asked her to revise the memo’s date twice.

She had refused to sign the revision because the supporting sampling records were incomplete.

When she questioned the discrepancy, she was transferred away from the project.

“Do you have the documents?” I asked.

“The investigators know where they are.”

“Then please don’t put yourself at risk for me.”

She breathed out slowly.

“I’m not doing this for you alone.”

She had grown up downstream from Sterling, and her father still fished in the creek.

“I’m doing it because reports are supposed to describe reality,” she said.

“Not invent it.”

The following Saturday I visited my brother, Colin, who lived forty minutes away on a small farm with more chickens than he could reasonably identify.

We had been close as children and distant as adults, partly because grief made me withdraw and partly because he never knew how to reach someone who kept insisting he was fine.

He greeted me in work boots and an apron stained with flour.

“Hannah says you’re having a colorful week,” he said.

“That’s one way to put it.”

We sat on his porch with coffee while his old dog slept across the steps.