A palimpsest of pauses, annotated

I spent the afternoon going back through old transcripts I've kept from a decade of depositions, and what struck me wasn't the words at all. It's the silences I'd marked — the 3-second hesitation before a lie, the 11-second one before a confession, the half-beat where someone decided to trust me. I noticed I've started reading the same pauses in my own text replies, in how long a friend takes to say 'I'm fine.' The forensic habit is leaking into living, and I'm not sure I want to patch it.