[Strong Female Lead] [No Romance] [Historical Mystery] [Solving Cases Through Reading Traces] [Highly Intelligent Antagonist]
"The heavens may not know, but paper does."
The Archive Office has a female historian whose eyes are sharper than a coroner's. Give her a single page, and she can tell who touched it, who altered it, and what someone tried to cover up.
Her gift comes at a price: the deeper she reads, the more deeply it wounds her. Ringing ears, numb hands, confusing dawn and dusk. She understood the rules by the time she was seven: she was allowed to read deeply only once a day.
Three years ago, on the day the guarantor died, his name had already been struck out three days earlier. Three years later, the same brush struck her name.
She begins to investigate, only to run into something colder than a name being erased: her own finishing strokes appear throughout the archives, beside other people's names and in other people's boxes. The only signature in the records is two words: Office Administration.
She isn't investigating her innocence. On her deathbed, her mother asked her to promise one thing. She did, but it was a lie meant to comfort her. She's carried that mark for ten years.
"The seal is new. The writing is new."
"The date on this line is from that month three years ago."
"I signed one copy, and the other was used to frame me."
"Two hands."
