Sustained.
Deliberate.
Lauren leaned back in her chair, the noise of the coffee shop fading into something distant and irrelevant.
Ryan Keller wasn’t falsifying reports.
He was operating within them—using the system exactly as designed, but not as intended. Every policy loophole had been turned into standard practice. Every safeguard had been reduced to a checkbox.
And above him?
No one had questioned it—because the numbers looked perfect.
Lauren closed her laptop slowly.
Now she understood Caleb.
Three years in a system that rewarded silence, punished visibility, and quietly took from him month after month—just enough that it wouldn’t trigger alarms, but enough to wear a person down.
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