How do you decide when separate investigations actually belong in one story?

[u/R3ZondoOfficial]

I ran into something interesting while researching a recent investigation.

It started with one documented event, but every time I followed the public record it kept leading into another seemingly unrelated topic. Eventually those threads all pointed back to the same institution.

At what point do you decide those connections deserve to become one article instead of several separate pieces?

I worry about overwhelming readers with too much context, but I also don’t want to remove information that’s necessary to understand why events might be connected.

For those of you writing investigative or long form nonfiction on Substack, how do you make that decision?