As the deadline grew (about to happen, approaching)
,
the team worked with (careful, hard-working)
focus to keep the report (unified, well-connected)
.
Still, tensions ran high when a (aggressively defiant, eager to fight)
vendor tried to slip in an (illegal, forbidden)
fee, and the manager suspected a (hidden, not yet visible)
conflict of interest. The error in the budget was (enormous, huge)
,
yet the true cause continued to (escape notice, be hard to catch)
investigators until a professor of (the study of human societies and cultures)
reviewed interviews and pointed out that the dispute wasn’t merely financial but also (conceptual, not concrete)
in nature—about identity and trust as much as numbers.