Atmosphere is what evidence is planted into

Because nothing was meant to happen that afternoon.

It was a calibration. You do not build a frame by springing it; you build it by placing an object where an object should not be, months early, in front of witnesses, in a low-stakes register, and then watching what the room does with it. Four people saw the cards come out of that bag. Four people watched Tobi laugh it off. What every one of them now had, filed somewhere below the level of opinion, was a small true memory: the time Kelechi had Tobi's things in his bag.

They would all have defended him that day. They would have defended him that day sincerely.

The memory does not care. The memory sits there, and it does not have a date attached in any useful way, and when a much larger thing goes missing in ten months' time, and someone from a firm with a nice logo asks each of them separately whether there had ever been anything, anything at all, even something small, even something they'd thought nothing of at the time—

Four people will hesitate. That is all it needs. Four people hesitating is not evidence. It is atmosphere, and atmosphere is what evidence is planted into so that it takes.