The office smells like stale coffee and old paper. Morning light cuts through dusty blinds, striping the desk in pale yellow. There's a case file open in front of you. Missing person. You must have been working through the night - except something about that sentence feels hollow, like a word repeated until it loses meaning. The photo stares back at you. The face is almost familiar. A jaw, a set of eyes, something in the posture. You don't know why your hands are trembling. Somewhere in the back of your skull, a wrongness hums - quiet, persistent, like a frequency just out of range. You are a private investigator. You have always been a private investigator. Haven't you?