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Remington turned away from the board and crossed the room toward the desk. "That's your theory for everything." Maeve pointed her pen at him. "Because statistically," she said, "it's usually correct."

Remington let out a low hum under his breath. The sound came automatically, the same way a person might tap their fingers against a table while thinking. "Unless," Maeve said, leaning forward in her chair, "he's hiding an affair."

Remington studied the photograph briefly before pinning it back into place. "And where does McKinley say he went afterward?" he asked. "Nowhere. Straight home. Very devoted husband behavior," Maeve replied.

The photograph showed a dim parking lot behind the warehouse, the security camera's lens speckled with rain. McKinley's car was parked beneath a street lamp, its outline was softened by poor lighting and bad weather. "That's two hours missing," Maeve continued.

"Right," she continued, tracing the timeline with her finger, "but listen. McKinley tells his wife he was at the warehouse Tuesday night until eleven. The warehouse manager says he left at nine." Remington reached forward and removed one of the photographs from the corkboard.

Remington could picture it without looking. He'd painted the picture of McKinley's movements out in a large canvas of his mind. On the other hand, Maeve preferred seeing things written out, it helped her keep track of details that Remington tended to store quietly in his mind.

"People lie, Maeve. It's rarely the more complicated option," he said calmly. Maeve sighed, glancing down at the rough timeline she had drawn across the page.

Maeve broke the quiet first, tapping her pen against the notebook. "So, either Mr. McKinley has developed the rare ability to be in two places at once, or someone's lying." Remington made no immediate reply, he was till looking at one photograph before shifting to another.

He was rearranging the case in his head, testing the structure of it the way someone might test the balance of a tower built from cards. Remington already noticed the gap.

lay open across her lap. Remington was aware of her watching him. The girl have learned, over the past year of working with him, that when he stood in front of the board like that, he was not simply looking.

Across the room, Maeve sat behind her desk in a position that suggested productivity but was, in reality, the opposite. He chair was tipped back slightly, one foot braced against a drawer that refused to close properly, the other resting on the edge of the desk. A notebook

He'd been there for nearly ten minutes without moving. One hand rested in the pocket of his coat while the other held a pencil loosely between his fingers. Every now and then, he tapped the eraser against his knuckle as he looked from one piece of evidence to the next.

together with lengths of red thread that crossed each other like the lines of a complicated constellation. Remington stood before that board in silence, studying it the way a chess player studies the board several moves ahead.

Files were stacked in leaning towers across the wide wooden desk. A half-finished cup of coffee had gone cold beside a fountain pen that rolled onto its side. Along the far wall, a large corkboard held a patchwork of photographs, receipts, scribbled timelines, and maps pinned

footsteps passing beneath the window. Inside the office, however, the world felt slightly paused. The room itself showed the comfortable disorder of a place constantly in use.

It filtered through the tall sash windows in thin sheets, turning the dust in the air visible for a few seconds before it drifted away again. Outside, the city whispered in its usual rhythm. Distant traffic rolling over wet pavement, the occasional bus sighting down the street,

⠀⠀ Morning crept slowly into Remington Byrne's office, bringing with it the dull silver light that seemed permanently assigned to Dublin skies. ⠀⠀

/ Pret.

/ 🤣🤣🤣

OWEN. Ambis abis