This Sociological Life

Pryor's confession still hung in the theatre when Jonah, sitting two seats from where he'd been quietly placed at the start of the evening, stood without being asked.

"Professor Hume used to say the facts don't speak for themselves," he said, to a room that had spent the whole evening deciding whose story this actually was. "Somebody always has to decide which facts get collected, and why, and who's allowed to hear them afterwards. I think that's the bit he wished he'd worked out sooner. I think it's the bit I've just watched you work out considerably faster than he managed, over about nine days."

You read the rest of Hume's manuscript aloud, there, on the Grand Lantern's stage where he'd meant to read it himself - the full confession, Candour named plainly, Thorncastle named plainly, his own thirty years of comfortable not-quite-looking named most plainly of all. Halvorsen wept, openly, somewhere in the dark of the stalls. Even Ashby, to her credit, didn't try to stop you.

Candour's contract was terminated within the week, the funding gap it left behind becoming, within the year, the subject of a rather smaller and more honest grant application. Thorncastle's pitch deck found its way, eventually, to a journalist who knew exactly what to do with it.

You resigned your Chair before anyone could offer you one. Jonah's temporary contract ran out three weeks later; you were the one who rang him, this time, before he could find a warehouse job instead.

"I don't actually know how to run a detective agency," you told him, on the pavement outside a building that would, within the month, hold a hand-lettered sign reading VOSS SOCIAL INVESTIGATIONS.

"Good," said Jonah. "Neither do I. Seems like the honest place to start."