Chapter 444: A Harmless Reconstruction

Freya entered the next stage of the investigation with less fear than she would have felt a year earlier. Using a clean copy and entirely fictional test data, Mercer reconstructs the old branching mechanism.

The difference was not that the mysteries had become ordinary. They had not. It was that Freya had learned how to keep an unexplained event from swallowing everything around it. Derek preserved evidence, Mercer tested mechanisms, Claire handled narrative history, and Freya decided how much of the material she personally wanted to know.

The harmless test proves Chapter Eleven would normally be generated only after a reader selected one of several Chapter Ten options.

Louis respected those boundaries even when curiosity clearly bothered him. Since their conflict over his hidden recovery plan, he had become careful about the difference between offering information and forcing it into Freya's hands. If she declined to read a file, he no longer argued that knowing more was automatically safer.

That change had done more for their marriage than either of them openly admitted. Trust was returning through boring things: complete answers, disclosed meetings, shared calendars, and the absence of strategic half-truths. Freya still remembered the hurt, but she no longer felt as though she had to guard every question for fear of discovering another hidden layer.

Their lives also had enough real problems to prevent the research from becoming an obsession. Sunroom's cultural-center project demanded attention almost every day. Awake Stories was expanding faster than expected. The Open Page had become a community fixture with its own staff, events, and regular customers.

Freya valued those responsibilities because they existed independently of the question that had followed her since awakening: how had she entered this world? A perfect answer might change her understanding of the past, but it would not review construction drawings, negotiate publishing contracts, or decide what she wanted for dinner.

Claire sometimes joked that Freya had become aggressively committed to ordinary life. Freya accepted the description. After spending so long surrounded by predictive manuscripts and identity models, ordinary problems felt luxurious.

Mercer shared the instinct for a different reason. He repeatedly warned the team that experimental systems were easiest to misunderstand when their outputs were interpreted narratively. Humans naturally connected events into stories. Crosswind had been built around that tendency and had eventually become trapped by it.

So every new clue received two descriptions. The first was technical: what physically happened, what record existed, what process could be reproduced. The second contained interpretations, ranked from well supported to speculative. Freya found the method almost soothing.

At home, she continued keeping her own simpler version. Facts. Possibilities. Unknowns.

Louis once looked over her shoulder and asked why there was no section labeled 'things Louis thinks are obviously dangerous.'

Freya told him that category would require a separate notebook.

He looked offended for approximately three seconds before laughing.

Moments like that reassured her more than she expected. Their marriage had begun with awkward politeness, moved through affection and secrecy, and nearly cracked under the weight of truths delayed too long. Now they were learning something less dramatic and more difficult: how to disagree without treating disagreement as abandonment.

The hidden manuscript remained sealed throughout the latest developments. Freya had stopped feeling tempted to read ahead. If anything, the temptation had reversed. She wanted to prove to herself that hundreds of unread headings could exist without possessing authority over a single morning.

Derek also maintained a strict chain of custody for every old Crosswind artifact. No researcher was permitted to experiment on an original file when a forensic copy could answer the same question.

Before bed, she recorded the day's verified development and left the remaining page blank.

There had been a time when blank space frightened her because she thought it meant the story had not told her what happened next.

Now blank space looked like room.

Freya closed the notebook and went to sleep.