The first file back wasn't supposed to be a big one. A favour for a former client, a straightforward pre-approval, nothing that should have tested a process I hadn't run in five years. It tested it anyway.
Day nine is where it nearly came apart — a financing condition that should have been routine, caught late, with a closing date that wasn't moving. The old instincts were still there; what had changed was how calmly I trusted them.
Eleven days later, the file closed clean. Not because nothing went wrong, but because something did, and the process held. That's the only kind of comeback story worth telling.