The domestic at 1:15 PM was the first one.
The Net fired at medium intensity on the call — the specific frequency it used for conflict involving persons in close proximity with an elevated potential for violence. Ethan had read that frequency five hundred times in two and a half years and had calibrated his approach responses around it. He was out of the car before Tim had finished parking and through the apartment building's exterior door at a controlled pace that was two steps faster than procedure required.
The couple in unit 4B had already de-escalated. The woman had her hands wrapped around a coffee cup and was sitting on the couch. The man was at the kitchen counter with his back to the room. The shouting that the neighbor had heard through the wall had stopped before Ethan and Tim were at the bottom of the stairs.
Real tension. Real prior conflict. The frequency had not been wrong about that. But the read had given him medium intensity on something that was, at the moment of response, a situation that needed a calm conversation rather than a positioned entry. He had over-prepared for what was there.
Tim handled the welfare check in the apartment with the precision he used for everything — methodical, kind in the Bradford way that was functional rather than performed, the two parties given space to demonstrate they did not need further intervention. Ethan stayed near the door and tracked the room.
Walking back to the car, Tim did not say anything.
The robbery call came in at 2:44. Net fired before dispatch finished the broadcast — not unusually; the Net ran against incoming audio and could build a threat-profile from the dispatch language before the situation was fully articulated. Robbery in progress, two blocks east. Ethan indicated the direction before Tim had finished entering the address.
They arrived forty seconds behind a unit from another sector that had been closer. The suspect was already cuffed on the sidewalk. The arresting officer — Ortega, someone Ethan had shared a briefing with twice — looked up at them with the neutral expression of an officer who had handled the call and was mildly unclear why a second unit had arrived at speed.
"Good," Tim said, looking at the cuffed suspect. His tone communicated nothing except the neutral satisfaction of a situation appropriately resolved. He got back in the car.
Ethan got back in the car.
His hands were at their normal resting position on the wheel. He drove the next two blocks at the standard patrol speed. In his jacket pocket, the granola bar he had been carrying since Monday that he kept meaning to eat was there. He ate it now, one-handed, because his body had apparently decided the operational window for delayed nutrition had closed. It tasted like cardboard and honey and he ate all of it.
Tim read the sector map on the MDT and did not comment on the granola bar.
The traffic stop was at 3:38 PM.
The vehicle ran a yellow at Western and Olympic — technically legal, the kind of judgment call that patrol made twelve times a shift without generating paperwork. What made it a stop was the way the car had slowed before the intersection, assessed, and accelerated through — a specific decision pattern the Board had logged as the behavior of a driver who was calculating whether to run the light rather than simply running it.
Tim called it in. They followed.
The Net fired. Not at the medium intensity of the domestic — lower, and for that reason more ambiguous. Not danger-sense clarity but the faint wash of the emotional-compromise frequency that had been present for ten days, flooding the baseline around anything that involved a potential confrontation because Ethan's nervous system was running a background threat-model on everything that could go wrong in the field at a time when he was already carrying something that required field-threat awareness.
He was at the driver's door when he hesitated.
The hesitation lasted half a second. The driver's window was coming down. Tim, who had been at the passenger side, clocked the hesitation with the peripheral accuracy of a man who had been watching Ethan manage calls for two and a half years and knew the difference between Ethan reading a situation and Ethan processing something the situation had not presented.
Tim moved.
He was at the driver's door in the way Tim Bradford moved when he had decided the situation required him there — not running, not urgent, just completely present in a position Ethan had been half a second late to occupy. "Sir. Driver's license and registration."
The driver had a concealed carry that he disclosed immediately, correctly, with the paperwork in good order. Not a threat. A man who had been through this stop before and knew how to manage it. Tim verified, ran the plate, found no flags, issued a verbal warning on the yellow, let him go.
At end of shift, parked outside the station, Tim looked at the windshield for a moment.
"What's going on with you," Tim said.
Not a question. The Bradford version, which was a sentence that did not require the question mark because it had already decided that the answer existed and was going to be received rather than interrogated.
Ethan looked at the passenger-side mirror. A car passing on the street. The October light going orange on the buildings across from the lot.
"I'm carrying something," he said. "Give me a few days."
Tim sat with this for the specific duration — three seconds, which was the Bradford assessment window for statements that did not invite rebuttal or elaboration. Then he made the Bradford sound, which was somewhere between mm and silence and communicated: I register what you have said. I am not going to demand what I was not offered. I trust that when you have processed this to the point where it can be shared, you will share it.
"Okay," Tim said.
He got out of the car.
Ethan sat in the lot for another minute. The Net was still running its faint elevated baseline on every visible person in his field of view, which was the thing it was doing when he was not in active patrol mode and should have been winding down toward resting frequency. It was not winding down. It had not wound down in ten days.
He had one day before October 22.
He went inside.