This tiny utterance caused me to drop everything. The fact-check had been on a glide path through the report.

“What?”

“The record here’s pretty thin,” Lane said, waving the CD case. “Take a look.”

He pushed his laptop across the table along with his copy of the report, and then stood behind me to indicate the relevant sections.

“All this,” he said, sweeping his pen over a page of the appendix, “derives from this,” and he pointed to the spreadsheet from Ray’s CD. “And that, in turn, becomes this.” He showed me the paragraph of the report concerning Subject 12. “Just a single test has snowballed into a whole set of conclusions.”

“So?”

“It’s like pointing to a single star and calling it a constellation.”

I looked up at him and said, “I like that.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks.” Lane sat back down and tried another analogy. “Or like a single-source story. Everything derives from just one point, but you’ve stretched it until it seems, to the reader, to have resulted from a whole array of data. It’s not unethical, exactly, but it’s a stretch.”

“What do you recommend?”

“I’d confirm whether the CD from—what’s his name again?”

“Sunshine Ray.”

“If the CD is a complete record of Subject 12, or only partial. In other words, is that section of the report really founded on just one test, or are we missing something? I’m no doctor, but it’s odd that only one test would be run on the subject from December to February.”

I said, “February?”

“That’s what the report says.”

He showed me the line in the report. But I pointed to Ray’s data, which clearly stated that Jules had been discharged in December 2001, not February 2002. That’s what I’d told her friends—December.

“Good catch,” he said, “very nice.”

“What do you think’s going on?”

“Hard to say.”

“Could there be a simple explanation?”

“There usually is.” Lane sighed and stretched. “Today’s been a long one. Want to grab a drink? There’s a new place I read about in Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn?” I said. “No, I need to keep working.”

“Okay.” He opened up his notebook.

I could hear his pencil roughing the page and said, “You can go, you know.”

“No, it’s fine, I’ll stay.”

6.

I’d found my two-bedroom place in Hell’s Kitchen in 1997. It cost $1,300 a month, so I planned to die there. Paperback books were stacked to the ceiling to cut the cost of heat, a massive Persian rug covered a perplexing purple stain on the hardwood, and I tried to keep a fresh bouquet of lilies on the coffee table, though they usually turned a dismal spotted brown and broke apart before I bothered replacing them.