Chow Chi-wing, seventy-one years old, still lives in Wang Fuk Court's Block C. Not lives there, sorry, used to. Now he's in a hotel room the government is paying for, and he's been waiting since November for someone to tell him what actually happened to his building. This week he got an update: the report is delayed to late October. That's not a typo. Late October. The fire was last November.

Here's the thing that gets me. Ninety percent of the affected owners have already signed up for the government buyback. Ninety percent. People took the money and they're moving on with their lives before anyone has officially told them why their homes burned down. The independent committee says it needs more time because there's more evidence to go through, which, fine, fair enough, nobody wants a rushed report on a fire that killed people. But sit with the order of operations here. The city worked out how to pay everyone back before it worked out how to explain what happened. You can settle the money in nine months. The truth takes eleven, maybe twelve. That tells you which one the system actually knows how to do.