If you gathered a hundred people and showed them the exact tableau, the coded bags, the bulging hidden suitcase, the ledger of ratios, the map of secret marks, and asked them to guess what they were looking at, few of them would guess artisan baking supplies.

The features really did line up with the frightening interpretation; that is precisely why the frightening interpretation was so available.

My mistake was not in noticing that it looked alarming.

My mistake was in mistaking looks alarming for is alarming, in letting the surface resemblance harden into certainty without pausing to weigh it against everything else I knew.

Appearances are data, but they are only data, and the whole art of not ruining your life over a misunderstanding lies in holding the alarming appearance in one hand and everything you know about the person in the other, and refusing to act until you have weighed them against each other honestly.

I held only the appearance.