A pause. The kind of pause that means someone is deciding whether to tell a secret.

She booked the flight.

“How did you find out?” Petra’s voice had gone flat.

She opened the output file. Scrolled past the path coefficients, the R-squared values, the HTMT ratios. At the very bottom, in font so small it was almost invisible, was a single footnote.

“Erik,” she said slowly, “has anyone else run models on this machine? A student? A collaborator?”

Alina looked back at Erik’s laptop. The model was still frozen at iteration 7. The flicker had stopped. But now, in the corner of the screen, barely visible against the gray background, was a tiny text box she had never seen before.