6:47 AM

I remember the exact minute everything changed. Not because I wrote it down "” I didn't write anything down back then, that was the whole problem "” but because some moments tattoo themselves onto you.

It was a Tuesday in Coventry. February. The kind of cold that seeps through steel-toed boots and settles in your bones. I was standing in a site cabin that smelled like instant coffee and damp hi-vis, watching a £4.2 million project collapse over a missing signature.

The HSE inspector wasn't cruel about it. That's the thing nobody tells you. They're calm. Professional. They ask simple questions in reasonable tones while your entire career flashes before your eyes.

I knew we'd done the briefing. I'd watched Dave run it myself, clipboard in hand, twenty-three men nodding along in the morning fog. But the sign-off sheet? It was somewhere. Maybe in the yellow folder. Maybe photographed on someone's phone. Maybe attached to an email with the subject line "stuff" sent three weeks ago to someone who'd since left.

Four hours later, we found it. Crumpled in the back of a Transit van, coffee-stained, half the signatures illegible.

The work was good.

The team was good.

I was good.

We failed anyway.