A Voss and Pike Casefile: The First Case
Section 46: The Road Not Taken
"Not this one, Callum," you said - or signed Ashby's letter and let a Chair become the whole of your remaining career, whichever door you walked through to get here.
The coroner's verdict stood: natural causes, a known condition, a sad but unremarkable death. Candour's contract renewed on schedule. You kept your position, eventually your Chair, and taught Comte and Durkheim to twelve more years of undergraduates with a conviction that, if you were honest with yourself on the nights it was hardest to avoid being honest, had quietly curdled into something closer to performance.
You never did start Voss Social Investigations. Somewhere in this city, Jonah Pike finished his A-levels, went to a different university, and became something else entirely - and you never found out what, because you never had reason to look him up again.
Sociological note: declining to ask the hard question doesn't make the question disappear - it just means someone else, eventually, has to ask it instead, usually with less institutional memory and considerably less warning.