She decides on the tram, somewhere between her stop and his, that she’s going to ask him.

Not gently. She has tried gentle in her head three different ways since Wednesday night and none of them survive contact with how urgently she actually needs to know, so by the time she reaches the bolt-latch she has abandoned the softened versions entirely.

He’s at the row, deadheading, and looks up before she’s said anything, reading something in how she’s walking.

“What,” he says — her own word, handed back to her.

“Did you know,” she says, “that my routing to Sector 9 wasn’t random?”

He goes very still, the way he does when a question lands somewhere he wasn’t braced for.

“I found a manual override in the routing logs,” she says. “Four days before the flag reached me. Someone decided, specifically, that it should be my desk. Not the algorithm. A person, or something acting like one.” She hears her own voice climbing and doesn’t stop it. “So I need to know if you knew. If this was ever — if I was ever just walking into something that was already arranged.”

“I didn’t know,” he says.

“You wrote half the systems that could do this.”

“I wrote systems I left nine years ago. I have no access, no visibility, no way to trigger a routing override even if I wanted to.” He sets down the shears. “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know who did this, or why, or whether it means what you’re afraid it means.”

“But you think it could mean something.”

He’s quiet for a long moment, and she can see him deciding how much honesty to give her, which she has come to recognise as its own kind of tell.

“I think,” he says carefully, “that a system built to optimise everything does not generally leave things to chance, when chance can be improved on. I think that should worry you. I also think it changes nothing about what you chose to do once you were standing here. The override, if that’s what it was, could put you at this fence. It couldn’t make you come back. It couldn’t make you write anything. It couldn’t make you send it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” he says. “I don’t. Neither do you. That’s the part nobody gets to resolve — not you, not me. You’ll carry the not-knowing. I’m sorry. I don’t have anything better to give you.”

She looks at the flowers, radiant and indifferent, and finds, to her own surprise, that his refusal to comfort her with something false is the only thing in the conversation that actually helps.