The crawlspace hatch was where she'd left it — behind the water heater, painted over twice but still visible if you knew where to look. Nadia noted it on the form under Additional Access Points and moved on.
The kitchen faucet dripped. She ran it, counted seconds, wrote 1.2 GPM below rated flow, likely mineral buildup, recommend replacement. Professional language for a professional problem. She didn't write: I watched this faucet drip for eighteen years and never told anyone it bothered me.
The sellers were a couple in their fifties who'd bought the house when Nadia was already in college. They didn't know her. To them she was the inspector the buyer's agent had hired — clipboard, flashlight, moisture meter. They offered her coffee. She declined. You don't accept things from the house you're measuring.
In the basement she found the junction box she'd rewired at sixteen. Two circuits, both live, neither up to code. She'd done it to run speakers to a room that didn't have enough outlets. The wire was still there — 14-gauge on a 20-amp breaker, exactly the kind of shortcut her licensing exam had taught her to flag.
She photographed it. Wrote Improper wire gauge on circuits 7 and 9, fire hazard, requires licensed electrician. The irony wasn't lost on her. It was just irrelevant.
"Was it the building?" her supervisor had asked once, early in her career, when she'd flagged a house so thoroughly the sale collapsed. "If something was wrong, you could have just noted it and moved on. The buyers have their own risk tolerance."
She hadn't answered. The question assumed you could separate what was wrong with the house from what you noticed about it — that the deficiency existed independent of the person holding the flashlight.
Upstairs, the bedroom that had been hers. New paint. New carpet. A child's desk against the wall where her bed had been. She checked the window operation, the egress dimensions, the smoke detector. All fine. The room had become competent without her.
In the closet, she found the notch she'd carved into the door frame at thirteen — a growth mark, 5'1". Someone had spackled it and painted over it, but the ridge was still there under her thumb. She didn't photograph this. It wasn't a deficiency. It wasn't a feature either. It was just a measurement that no longer applied to anything.
She finished in two hours. Forty-six items on the report, eight flagged as significant, three recommended before close. The junction box was item number thirty-one. A stranger would rank it the same way. That was the point.
In the car she sat for a minute. The report was clean. Thorough. It would protect the buyer exactly as much as any report could. And it would never mention that the person who found the hazard was the person who made it — because that fact changed nothing about the wire gauge, the breaker rating, the combustion temperature of old insulation.
The reviewer and the reviewed shared a payroll. But the report didn't.
She started the car and pulled away without looking at the house again. The girl who'd run that wire had done it to hear music in a room that felt too quiet. The woman writing the report couldn't have told you what song.