Professor Hadley MacNamara arrives in Perth from Oxford carrying a private ledger and a plan to make things right. By the following morning, he is dead. Classics lecturer Alex Moreton noticed something wrong in a wine glass she was not supposed to notice. Working alongside Detective Sergeant Rachel Quinn, Alex begins to read the evening as a text: the practised ease of a senior administrator's conversation at the bar, the calculated stillness of a doctoral candidate during the toast, forty seconds of negotiation heard through a cedar screen. Three inconsistencies. Four. A pattern. The investigation leads back through fifteen years of formal complaints that were received, reviewed, and quietly directed to fail. And to a person who had built an entire institutional life on the conviction that the record could be managed — who had not considered that a classicist with thirty years of reading practice, a very old pharmacology seminar, and an absolute inability to look away from an inconsistency might also be reading the record.