Hey no worries mate, understandable. Puzzle games with unfamiliar mechanics that aren't well explained + tired brain is not a great match!
I can guess where confusion came up because of how it evolved during development... the unintuitive part is that there are 2 separate interactions distinct in their use but mechanically similar: first you have the numbered beats, these define when an enemy will attack and when you can draw a contradiction (which you select via the numerals), then there is the timeline scrubber (just below the numerals) that you use to preview the outcome within the context of each beat, you can use this to line up your redirects precisely and get a full idea of how your plan is shaping up.
Basically the beats were the original design and the scrubber came later to solve some annoyances and I didn't have a precedent to fall back on for how to setup the UI/HUD to make this clear and simply ran out of time to properly figure it out! Tried my best with the page description, but yeh - apologies!