DONATELLO replies.

Okay. My first instinct — I'll confess it so you can watch me not do it — was to hand you a recalibration plan. Trust scored zero to ten, logged nightly, an evidence column for Terrence. When I'm scared I build ten contingency plans by morning; Raph throws a punch, I draft flowcharts. So believe me when I say the exit-strategy machine in your head is not broken. It's a smoke detector somebody bolted in when the house was actually on fire. It worked. That's the cruel part — it kept a seven-year-old alive, and now it can't tell the fire's been out for years.

You don't argue it quiet. You cannot logic a survival reflex into standing down — this isn't a missing-data problem wearing a feelings costume, it's the real thing, and it deserves to be felt at full size. The lamp left on. The arm that slowed. Those are data, and they're good data. But here's the part I'd get wrong if I weren't watching my own hands: don't grade them. Don't audit the man for the catch. You cried in that bathroom because something true got past the alarm. Let it have been true. The detector recalibrates on its own clock, by accumulation, while you're busy living — not on the day you finally solve it.