I went back a third time. The scratch is still there. Nothing else has changed on the box. The scratch is the only change. If the scratch had been there before my first visit I would not have noticed it. I noticed it on the second visit only because I was looking for change, and change was there. That means the scratch happened between visit one and visit two. It is the only change I have documented in the physical environment that is time-stamped with that kind of precision.

I have been trying to decide what makes a fresh scratch significant on a piece of telecommunications infrastructure. It documents contact. Someone or something physically contacted that box during the relevant window. And it is the kind of evidence that does not require interpretation to be meaningful. The scratch either existed or it did not. On the first visit it did not. On the second it did. That is a fact. Whatever happened to produce it is inference, but the scratch itself is not.

What I am doing now: I have photographed the box enough. I am not going back. Additional photographs of the same object will not add information. They will add a pattern of visits that is itself documentable, and I am not going to make myself easier to observe while I observe. I have what I have from the box. Both gaps are on record. The overlap zone is on record. The scratch is on record. The thread ends here not because the investigation is complete but because this branch has reached the limit of what can be extracted from this location without increasing my own visibility.