They worked through the evening compiling everything Elena Ashford had left behind into a form that could survive being sent, seen, and understood by people who had never met her and would have no way of independently verifying a single word of it—which meant, Ezra explained, laying out the components across the cabin's small table like pieces of a puzzle neither of them fully trusted to fit, that the material had to speak for itself, clearly and completely, without requiring anyone's blind faith to land.

"The journal excerpts establish motive and timeline," Ezra said, arranging photocopies with the same careful precision he brought to everything technical. "The research notes establish...