He found the threads at eight AM.
He hadn't been looking for them specifically — had opened his phone with the ordinary intention of checking his morning briefing, the industry news he scrolled through every day before the office filled and the noise of the working day made quiet reading impossible. The broadband contract headline was everywhere. He'd seen it the night before when it broke and had read it with the specific attention of someone cataloguing a development in a situation he was monitoring.
He hadn't read the commentary then.
He read it now.
The first thread took him eleven minutes to get through.
Not because it was long — it was long, but that wasn't why. It was because he kept stopping. Kept reading sentences twice. Kept sitting with the specific quality of what was being said and what it meant and what it confirmed about the last several months of his life that he hadn't wanted confirmed.
