Against the register

The recorded interview made the evacuation sound orderly. At first, I underlined the speaker’s confident dates, grateful for a sequence I could follow. Then the harbour register placed two vessels elsewhere that morning. I returned to the transcript, marking each claim as provisional until another source supported it. The contradiction did not make the interview worthless: its hesitations revealed where memory had blurred events, while its vivid details preserved fear absent from the official columns. By the end, I had replaced my neat timeline with several qualified possibilities.

Select one word or phrase from each stage of the writer’s response which shows the change from trusting the interview’s clear sequence to treating its claims cautiously.