It clicks. The graph she's been staring at for an hour is a mirror — the left peak is the reflection, not a separate event. Everything she thought was two things is one. She sits back. She has to catch up to what she's just seen.
"Wait, say that again." She puts her coffee down. "The study was funded by whom?" He tells her again, same words. And there it is. The conclusion of that paper has been sitting on her desk for a month, and the funder is the exact company whose competitor the paper is trashing. She almost laughs. The whole shape of it is suddenly visible.
He read the line three times. Something about the tense was wrong. And then, all at once, he understood. His brother hadn't been describing what happened; he'd been describing what he wished had happened. The whole letter was an apology for something that had gone differently in reality. It rearranged every previous conversation they'd ever had.
