Daniel comes on Sunday with the Whitlocks in tow — a couple in their sixties, the kind of quiet that comes from decades of not being listened to rather than from having nothing to say.

Elias has the forms spread on the outdoor table, weighted at the corners against a wind that keeps almost lifting them. He has done this before, a lifetime ago, in a different register — reviewing submissions, deciding which language would survive contact with a committee and which would not. The skill turns out not to have left him. It was only resting.

“Start with the facts,” he says. “Not the feeling. The feeling is true and it will not move anyone reading this. Dates. Addresses. How long you’ve lived here.”

Mrs. Whitlock has brought a folder, unprompted — tenancy records going back to 2029, repair requests she filed and the responses she got, most of them a single line: noted, scheduled for review.

“You kept all this,” Elias says.

“You keep things,” she says, “when you’ve learned nobody else will.”

He shows them where the appeal form asks for “demonstrated community contribution” and how to answer it without sounding like a plea. Mr. Whitlock ran the water point rotation for six years. Daniel’s wife teaches three children in the block who don’t have anywhere else to learn to read. None of this will move a model. All of it might move a person reviewing the model’s output, if the sentence is built correctly, and Elias knows exactly how sentences like that get built, because he built the form they’re using.

“You’re good at this,” Daniel says, watching him work.

“I should be. I wrote the categories your answers get sorted into.” He doesn’t look up from the page. “I’m not proud of that. I’m telling you because you should know what you’re dealing with, and because knowing the shape of a thing sometimes helps you fit inside it or around it.”

Mrs. Whitlock studies him for a moment. “Owen said you used to work for the Accord. He never said doing what.”

“He knew enough not to ask more.”

They fill out three forms by the time the light starts going long across the yard. He tells them what he can about the ninety-day window, the secondary appeal, the fact that outcomes are rare but not impossible — he does not oversell it, and they seem grateful for that more than they would be for false comfort.

When they leave, Daniel lingers at the gate.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks. “You don’t know us.”

Elias considers the honest answer and gives most of it. “Because I know what happens if nobody does.”

Daniel nods slowly, like a man filing something away, and goes.