On paper, there was no doubt at all.

But paper does not sit across a table from a person for five years and watch their eyes, and the people who had only ever seen Elena’s case on paper were not the ones who would, in the end, begin to wonder.

It is worth pausing on the strange power of paper, because Elena’s whole tragedy lived inside it.

A case file is a thing of enormous authority.

It is official, and it is thorough, and it is assembled by serious people following serious procedures, and when you read one it carries the weight of the entire system that produced it.