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I reach for my calipers.

Whoever took him apart may have been responsible for the table leg. They may not have been. That's the irritating thing about context: proximity has a habit of impersonating causation when you aren't careful.

The rest of his skeleton is less ambiguous.

The pronounced muscle attachments along his humeri and forearms suggest years of repetitive upper-body work, and the vertebrae in his lower back show enough degenerative change to tell me whatever he did for a living involved doing it often and doing it hard. His right radius fractured years before his death and healed with a slight misalignment, the bone knitting itself back together without the benefit of anyone particularly concerned with how straight it was afterward.

Given that parsons back then frequently doubled as farmers, the heavy wear on his frame isn’t all that surprising.

His teeth tell their own story. Advanced dental attrition across the molars. Calculus along the gumline. One abscess severe enough to have eaten a small cavity into the bone around the root of a lower tooth. It would have hurt. Considerably. There are no signs anyone did anything about it.

Even the places that never technically broke have changed under pressure. Bone adapts to whatever we repeatedly ask of it, adding and remodeling itself along lines of stress until years of ordinary movement become anatomical fact.

He spent decades leaving pieces of his life behind without knowing he was doing it.

None of it required his cooperation.

That’s what I like about bones.

People edit. They omit. They misremember. They lie with astonishing creativity and occasionally for no discernible reason at all. The skeleton simply records what happened to it.

My job is to read the receipts.

Love. Violence. Illness. Work. Spectacularly failed logic. Given enough of a person, I can usually provide a cold audit of an entire existence.

This man has been dead for nearly two centuries, and this morning I already know where his body absorbed years of strain, which injuries healed, and that someone took him apart after death.

I still don't know why they replaced his femur with furniture.

But it's nine in the morning and the day is young.

People think they take their secrets to the grave, but they’re really just handing them over to me for a final, formal accounting.

My phone rings again. This time I glance toward the screen.

MARA KLINE—STILLWATER PD

Absolutely not.

I turn back to my clergyman.

Popular fiction has this romanticized image of anthropologists knee-deep in dirt trenches, but my reality is sterile, fluorescent, and lived largely in the quiet of the Sterling-Hayes Institute’s back rooms.

I am a curator of the forgotten, tasked primarily with the skeletal remains of people who have been dead for centuries—remnants of ancient civilizations and long-lost settlements that the public only sees behind glass. I analyze the architecture of history, mapping diets from isotopes and tracing migrations through the wear on a molar. It’s a job of patience and specificity, where I handle the past with white-gloved reverence.

Every once in a while, though, the present leaks in.

Those are the cases I like considerably less.

It’s easier to deal with tragedy when it’s ancient—when the grief has been bleached out by time and the stakes are purely academic. The modern stuff is sticky. It leaves a residue you can’t brush off with a fine-bristle tool. It reminds you that you’re made of the same fragile, breakable material as the specimens on the table.

I’ve spent quite a long time trying to outrun that particular realization.

Forensics is, by design, a one-way mirror. It’s a comfortable arrangement, provided I remain the one holding the clipboard.

The difficulty lies in the transition from examiner to subject. I’m not particularly fond of being dissected myself.

When you spend your days classifying how people survived—and how they didn’t—you start treating your own life like a vulnerability study. You identify the variables most likely to cause problems and eliminate as many of them as possible. Interaction with others is, unfortunately, a difficult variable to eliminate entirely.