All Reasonable Evidence

"The file says otherwise."

Cai Wen-Solís doesn't say this to be difficult. He says it because it's true, because it's always been true, and because the truth of the archive is the only kind he knows how to work with. In thirteen years of academic archaeology and heritage authentication, he has never left a podium without the right answer, never footnoted a claim he couldn't defend, never allowed the disorder of other people's assumptions to contaminate the precision of his findings.

He has also never once arrived at a commission to find someone had already changed the light bulb.

When a disputed inheritance draws Cai to a crumbling Georgian manor on the Welsh borderlands — the Aldermoor estate, its provenance chain broken somewhere in the 1790s, its documents shelved in the particular order of three different hands across two centuries — he expects the work to be exactly what it is: precise, painstaking, and quietly decisive. He does not expect his co-investigator.

Declan Ferris doesn't explain himself. He orders coffee at the correct temperature, from the village café Cai visits alone, at the time Cai would need it. He changes overhead bulbs from fluorescent to warm LED without being asked and without mentioning that he's done it. He reads your published notes from three years ago and cites them twice, in the footnotes, without fanfare. He notices everything — and requires nothing from you in return.

For Cai, who has spent his entire professional life managing the distance between what he perceives and what the world expects him to perform about what he perceives, this is a problem for which he does not have a methodology.

Working in the archive room above the frost-white manor grounds, surrounded by box files and provenance gaps and the particular smell of paper stored well for a very long time, Cai and Declan are building two things simultaneously: the evidentiary case that will determine the future of Aldermoor, and a shared document that neither of them has fully named yet. The version history records everything. The timestamps do not lie.

All Reasonable Evidence is a slow-burn literary romance for readers who want their love story told in margin notes and citation alerts, in the grammar of care that never needs to be announced. It is a book about the rare, specific pleasure of being correctly known — and the work it takes to finally allow that.

Can Cai, who has footnoted his way through every problem life has given him, find the language for the one conclusion the evidence has been building towards all along?