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My phone continues vibrating against the desk.

Apparently, Mara has decided half a lifetime of friendship exempts her from taking a hint.

What she doesn’t understand is that detachment isn’t a preference. It’s good methodology.

Memory is unreliable. People misremember things constantly, usually with complete confidence. Emotion makes it worse. Give two people the same event and enough time, and eventually you’ll have uncountable versions of what happened.

Bones are considerably less creative.

Pressure produces predictable changes. Trauma leaves evidence. Injuries heal or they don’t. Everything can be measured, classified, compared.

No one has ever handed me a mandible and insisted I misunderstood its tone.

This is one of several reasons I prefer them to people.

I’ve engineered my profession around the delineation between observation and involvement. In the lab, I am calm. Focused. Useful. I know what to look for and, more importantly, when to stop looking.

Outside these sterilized walls, the rules are less clear. Questions appear without warning. Conversations drift. People expect narratives instead of data—conclusions instead of margins of error. They ask about childhoods. About the past.

About things that were never formally resolved.

Which is why I don’t answer calls from home.

I especially don’t answer video calls from home at nine in the morning on a Friday, when my coffee is still cooling and my brain is in a fragile ceasefire with the concept of human interaction.

Home is the one place where context and contamination are basically the same thing. There’s too much history and too little evidence. Everyone remembers everything differently, no one agrees on what actually happened, and somehow they all still expect me to participate.

I find distance considerably more manageable.

So I stare at Mara’s name until the phone buzzes itself into silence.

Then it buzzes again.

I sigh, drag a hand down my face, and accept the call before she escalates to calling my office, my contracting officer, or my mother.

All three are unacceptable alternatives.

Mara’s face fills the screen. Same high cheekbones. Same hair pulled back too tight. The same look in her eyes that says she’s already decided how this conversation ends.

“Morning, Dr. Harper,” she says brightly.

“Detective Kline,” I reply. “This feels like a trap.”

I slide the silver band from my thumb and set it into a sharp, centrifugal blur against the desk. I track the rotation, waiting for the momentum to fail so the metal can finally settle back into a predictable position.

“It’s not a trap,” she says. “It’s a…professional courtesy. Of sorts.”

“That’s actually worse, my friend.”

She smiles anyway. We grew up in the same zip code and under the same pressures; she doesn’t need a microscope to see the micro-fractures in my composure.

“I’ll get to it, then,” she says. “We found remains and I need your expertise.”

I don’t respond right away.

Mara watches me with the patience of someone who learned long ago how to wait me out.

Even after years of skeletal analysis, digging through mass graves, disaster sites, and quiet lab work, those are still words that don’t soften with repetition.