She finds the third case while looking for something else.
This is how it usually works. You stop looking for a thing directly because looking for a thing directly is how you teach yourself to find only versions of what you already expect. She has been reviewing a routine facilities request — eighteen months old, different department, nothing flagged. A 23-day authorization window. Activity logged inside it. No formal record of what happened inside those 23 days.
The structure is identical.
She sits with the file for an hour before she opens the probability window document. Not because she needs time to understand what she is looking at. Because understanding is the easy part. She is sitting with the question of what she owes the finding before she names it.
Two cases was a possibility. Three cases is a pattern.
She knows what a pattern means. It means she is no longer documenting an anomaly. It means someone made a decision — not once, not twice, but across departments and across time — to leave a particular kind of activity unrecorded. That is not a gap. That is an architecture.
She opens the document. She writes: Third case. Facilities department. 23-day window. Activity confirmed. Documentation absent.
Then: Criteria for pattern: met.
She does not underline it. The underline would be a claim she is making. She is not making a claim yet. She is recording a finding. The difference matters: claims require confidence, findings require accuracy. She is accurate. She is not yet confident about what the accuracy means.
She closes the document. Opens it again. Reads the three entries in sequence.
The pattern is there whether she underlines it or not.