Chapter 5

The platform took three weeks to build.

Not the technical part — that was straightforward enough that Soo Yee completed it in four days, a clean presentation site with a neutral design that put the documents front and center and kept everything else out of the way. No graphics. No emotional language. No calls to action. Just the data, organized by category, each document linked directly to its PACER source so that anyone who wanted to verify what they were looking at could do so in under thirty seconds.

The three weeks were for something else entirely.

She read every document again. Every score sheet, every rating column, every file in her cross-reference. She was looking for anything that could be used to challenge the analysis — any variable she hadn’t accounted for, any legitimate explanation for the pattern that she had missed or dismissed. She ran the significance test twice more using different statistical models to confirm the result wasn’t a function of her methodology. She had Sung Min review the evidentiary structure three times, not for legal framing but for gaps. Places where a skeptic could get a foothold.

There were none. The pattern was exactly what it appeared to be and the documents were exactly what they were — the institution’s own records, produced under court order, reflecting its own evaluators’ own numbers. She had not interpreted them. She had organized them.

Mr. Castillo had asked her twice during that period whether she was ready, and both times she had said not yet, and he had nodded and said take the time you need, and she had appreciated that he understood the difference between hesitation and preparation.

On a Thursday evening in November she sat at the kitchen table with her laptop and her parents in the adjacent room and Sung Min on a video call from New Haven, his dorm room visible behind him, casebooks stacked on his desk like a small city.

“Walk me through it one more time,” he said.

She did. Beginning to end. The site structure, the document organization, the cross-reference methodology, the significance analysis, the sourcing. Twenty-two minutes without interruption.

When she finished Sung Min was quiet for a moment.

“It’s ready,” he said.

“I know.”

“Once it’s up it’s up.”

“I know that too.”

He looked at her through the screen. “How are you feeling?”

It was not a question he asked often. She considered it honestly.

“I feel like the documents say what they say and the analysis shows what it shows and neither of those things changes based on how I feel about it.”

Sung Min almost smiled. “Okay.” He paused. “I want to say one thing before you publish.”

“Go ahead.”