Yahya has been at this for three years and he can argue both sides better than most people he knows.

What he changes is not the arguing. He stops trying to change the arguing at all, because he already tried that and it went badly.

What he changes is one small thing. When it arrives, he writes down which of the two it is. Arrived, or went looking for it. That is the whole entry, three words, on his phone.

After a fortnight there are twenty two entries and twenty one of them say arrived. Nineteen of those are between eleven at night and two in the morning.

Nothing about that closes the question. What it does is turn the thing from a verdict about his soul into something with a time of day attached, and he says the time of day is what made the difference, because a verdict cannot have a pattern and this obviously did.