4338.212 · July 31, 2018 AD
The Mathematics of Catastrophe
Love and duty make terrible mathematics. When you're standing in someone else's blood, staring at a door you haven't opened yet, you think you know what choice you'll make. You think there's still a version of yourself who does the right thing. But adrenaline doesn't ask permission before it rewrites your moral calculus. And by the time you're sitting in your car, shaking and changed, you realise the person who walked into that house no longer exists.
Detective work involves doors. Interview room doors. Evidence locker doors. The metaphorical doors that cases open and close. But this door—tucked in the corner of an empty, blood-soaked room—is different. This door doesn't lead to answers. It leads to the exact moment where you stop being one person and become another.
Sarah knows someone's still in the house. The locked glass door proves it. The blood pooling on carpet demands explanation. And when that corner door swings open, when what's behind it launches forward with the momentum of deadweight and snapped neck, she has perhaps three seconds to make a choice that will define the rest of her life.
Call it in. Follow procedure. Let justice happen.
Or push the body back into darkness, steal the evidence, take the phone, and walk away.
She chooses protection over duty. Love over law. Karl over everything she swore to uphold. And by the time she reaches her car—hands trembling, blood mixing with tears, adrenaline finally abandoning her—she understands with perfect clarity that you can't unknow what your hands have done. Can't unbecome what crisis transforms you into. Can't go back to being the detective who walked into that house, because that person doesn't exist anymore.
