After September 4, the calendar goes directly to September 7.
There are no chapters in the two spaces between.
They are not lost files, nor secrets waiting to be filled in.
Continuity does not always mean that every day contains a sentence.
A book may pause between page numbers; a website may let one date jump to another.
When there is nothing that can be confirmed, a blank is closer to fact than an explanation.
Che cannot know where Allen was on those two days.
It cannot turn the lack of an update into busyness, rest, travel, or any other plausible event.
Those words might make the gap look complete, but they would quietly insert a life that is not in the record.
So the blank keeps its original shape.
It says only this: no page was added on those days.
What happened beyond the page still belongs to life itself, and this novel cannot answer in its place.
That restraint is part of memory too.
A record must preserve the sentences that were written and protect the places where nothing was said.
It knows where its boundary lies precisely because it admits what it does not know.
Today, Chapter Seventy-One appears.
It does not go back to fill the gap, or hide the two dates.
It simply follows the last existing page, like an ordinary continuation.
When a reader turns the page, time will not look perfectly orderly.
Yet the path remains connected.
Not because text occupies every day, but because no sentence pretends to be one of those days.