Beth Rowan had called three times before the complaint reached Nina. Those calls were listed as contacts, each with a different person's initials beside it. Nina had never heard her voice.
She remembered the little photograph in the old interface, a woman whose hair was caught back so tightly that her ears showed. There was no photograph here. Just the reference, the old correspondence and Nina's name beneath the decision.
The bagel cooled beside the keyboard. Nina opened the first message.
Beth had moved. Her property-management company held a forwarding address it wasn't meant to give out. Martin Reed had been put forward as a household recovery contact, with a consent Beth said she'd never given. The company wanted Threadline to reconcile the dispute. It had supplied evidence of its own and asked for independent corroboration.
Nina remembered this part. The field statements had arrived after nearly a week of back-and-forth, when everybody involved had begun asking when the file could be closed. Two visits. Two people. Both said the contact had been authorized.
She opened Beth's last message before the closure.
The date is wrong on both statements. I was at work on the 12th. I have already told you this. Both men say “settled comfortably with family assistance.” Why would two people say that? I did not give Martin permission to be the contact. Please do not let them send him where we are. Call me. Use the number you used before.
Nina took her hand off the mouse.
She could hear the room around her: a phone ringing three desks away, the copier dragging paper, someone trying to open a packet of crackers without interrupting a call. Eighteen months ago it had sounded much the same, although her desk had been downstairs then. A different view, the same requests coming in faster than anyone could finish them.
Her own note appeared beneath Beth's message. Common wording consistent with field template. No additional independence concern established.
She had written it at the desk with the cracked laminate. Somebody had put a sticker over the crack; the corner caught beneath her wrist whenever she typed. She remembered being irritated by it. Such a small thing to remember so clearly.
That week she had got a man back into a service he'd been wrongfully denied. An old address, a clumsy explanation, a reviewer frightened to make the exception. Nina had fought the decision, shown the client why the mismatch didn't mean what it thought, and won. People had forwarded her account of it. A director on the client side had asked her to present it herself.
The method was working. It taught people to distinguish a meaningful contradiction from the ordinary untidiness of a life.
She had treated Beth's contradiction as untidiness.
Nina clicked through to the two field statements. The same date on both. The phrase repeated exactly, including the word comfortably, so absurd in light of Beth's message that Nina looked away from it.
The statements bore different reference identifiers. The submitting source was Fieldspan. A corporate attestation, routed through a separate reviewer. The individual names weren't in the material she'd received. She had taken the separation of channels as evidence of separation of sources.
One attachment contained a visit photograph: a man at a doorway, a strip of red tile behind his shoulder. It made the statement seem more bodily and therefore, at the time, more true. She had no independent name for him, only the submission reference beneath the image.
She could have left her contested-contact recommendation open for forty-eight hours. The callback number, already independently established during the earlier contacts, was one page away. She didn't need Vivian's permission to call it. She'd needed ten minutes and a willingness to hear something that might leave the file unresolved.
She reached for the bagel, then put it down.
On the other side of the partition, Ethan Brody pushed his chair back. “You coming to the eleven?”
Nina glanced at the time. “Tell them I'll be late.”
“You okay?”
“Yes. Just this.”
He looked at her screen, not close enough to read it, then at her untouched food. He didn't ask again.
She opened her reply to Beth. It was polite. She had thanked her for her patience. Beneath the language selected from the approved responses, Nina had added two sentences of her own explaining that similar wording did not by itself establish collusion. She had wanted Beth to understand. Looking at it now, she could remember the satisfaction of supplying a reason rather than a bare decision.
She read it twice. Then she opened the rest of the history.
There was a later action reference belonging to the property company's support operation. Nina could see a disposition, not its underlying exchange. The recommendation had gone onward. Whatever the client had done after that wasn't in the part of the record she had reviewed.
She copied the action reference into a request for the associated material. A warning appeared: outside current review scope. She could still send the request, but it would be logged to her manager.
She paused with her finger over the key.
Just your closure, Vivian had said.
The action was what her closure had led to. Nina sent the request.
While she waited, she called Beth's old verified number from her work line. It went to a recorded message that gave no name. Nina said who she was, gave her work extension and asked Beth to call. She didn't say Martin's name or the address in a message that somebody else might hear.
Her own phone vibrated before she had finished putting the handset down. Adam. She watched the screen until the call stopped.
He sent a message. Any luck?
She wrote Still looking and sent it. That was true. It was all she wanted to give him.
The records request came back asking for a reason. Nina supplied the connection to her own recommendation and identified the current patient contact. She kept the explanation short. The person on the other side asked whether this was a new assigned investigation.
Review of my earlier work, authorized this morning.
Another pause. Then the reply: Your manager needs to confirm extension of scope. Please don't contact the client directly until this is resolved.
Nina leaned back. She could feel the shape of the morning closing around her: the meeting, Vivian's permission, the sensible narrowness of a task. Nothing in that reply was remarkable. She had written variations of it herself when people went looking through material because curiosity felt like a professional duty.
She forwarded the exchange to Vivian and asked to go further. Then she called the internal directory number for the reviewer who had accepted Fieldspan's attestation.
The woman answered out of breath. “I'm about to walk into something.”
“Two minutes. Old file.” Nina gave the reference.
“That's old-old.”
“Eighteen months.”
“What do you need?”
“Fieldspan. Was it two people or two submissions from one source?”
Keys tapped. The woman said, “I've got two submission references.”
“I can see those.”
“Then I don't know what you're asking.”
“Whether you knew the people. Whether somebody checked they were actually independent.”
The tapping stopped. “Nina, I accepted what was routed. If there's an issue, send it through.”
“I'm not trying to make this your fault.”
“I didn't say you were.”
But she'd heard it. Nina heard herself too, pressing hardest where another person was closest at hand.
“Okay,” she said. “Thank you. I'll send it.”
After the call she put her hands flat on the desk. Across the aisle the junior reviewer was explaining the address discrepancy to his client, calmly now. He sounded like her. She had been proud of that.
Vivian's reply arrived. Come back to me before pursuing this. I'm tied up until lunch.
Nina didn't answer. She put Beth's old number on a piece of paper and slipped it into the small pocket of her bag, beside the hospital visitor pass. The two pieces of paper fitted together badly; one was stiff and square, the other soft at its folds.
She took the visitor pass out. Her name was printed above the word visitor. It had seemed to explain her while she was wearing it.
The hospital's number appeared on her phone.