Ten explanations failed in a row

I needed one location on the road to be empty, and I spent two days building reasons why it would be. Drawdown. Fault movement. Bad water. Heat. Transport. Ten of them, one after another, and every single one collapsed when I checked it against something real.

The tell was the pattern, not any single failure: a new constraint arrived exactly when the previous one died. That is not research. That is defending a conclusion I had inherited from my own earlier draft and never questioned.

The answer, when it came, was one line long and needed no mechanism at all — and the place is better for it.