“I got him fired.

Six days before the crash.”

What Harrison had not known — what nobody knew until Desmond pulled the service’s internal file — was what Mark told the dispatcher on his way out: that he had been let go over a personal matter involving a client’s wife, and that it wasn’t finished.

The dispatcher had written it in a note field.

It sat in a database for two years.

What happened on the fourteenth of May, two years earlier, was reconstructed from four sources: the original crash report, a fire investigator’s supplement, the independent mechanical review Harrison had commissioned three months after the accident and then been unable to read, and — eventually, the thing that ended it — the woman herself.