Abena had thought of the 14-day window as the part she could not see.
The policy published on a Wednesday. The first documented exercise was fourteen days later, on a Tuesday, at 2:47 in the afternoon, in a medium-priority compliance log that had never been flagged. Between those two points: nothing.
She had called it a gap. In every version of the document, it was a gap — white space, the absence of evidence, the forensic equivalent of a closed door.
Dr. Ferreira read it for six minutes. Then he said: the window is your strongest argument if you can show no alternative exercise pathway existed.
Abena did not respond immediately. She was recalculating.
She had been reading the window as the thing she could not prove. He was reading it as the thing that proved the shape of what happened. Fourteen days in which no one exercised the permission through any other route. Fourteen days in which, if the permission had been actively circulating, some trace would likely exist.
The absence, correctly bounded, was not a hole. It was a silhouette.
She went back to the document that night and rewrote the section header. Not 'Limitations: Documentation Gap' — 'Evidence of Scope: Authorization Window.' The paragraph underneath remained almost identical. The framing changed everything.
The probability window was not the part she could not see. It was the part that told her exactly how large the invisible part was, and what shape to look for on the other side.