Five days was not a long time to prepare for the most important conversation of a life.
I spent the first of those five days reviewing everything we had. The Harren documentation, the father's file, the payment trail, the checkpoint records, the Church review response, the corrected marriage registration filing, the archive letters with their documented language patterns, the linguistic analysis that had been completed the day before and had reached its conclusion with the professional confidence the analyst had required before committing to it. All of it laid out in the study in the careful sequence of a presentation that needed to be complete without being overwhelming, comprehensive without losing its essential shape.
