diff --git a/.gitea/workflows/release.yml b/.gitea/workflows/release.yml
index bc938fb..7304a54 100644
--- a/.gitea/workflows/release.yml
+++ b/.gitea/workflows/release.yml
@@ -187,19 +187,22 @@ jobs:
 
       # Read the release notes from the tag object itself.
       #
-      # This is not paranoia about the notes file. Across five runs of this
+      # This is not paranoia about the notes file. Across six runs of this
       # workflow, act_runner produced worktrees where `git ls-files docs` and
       # `ls docs/releases` both showed docs/releases/v0.1.3.md while the file
       # itself was absent — intermittently, from the same commit — and then
       # `git show HEAD:...` came back empty too, because the shallow fetch had
-      # not brought that blob across. Three separate ways of reading one file
-      # failed for three different reasons, and v0.1.3 shipped a placeholder
-      # body three times because of it.
+      # not brought that blob across. v0.1.3 shipped a placeholder body four
+      # times before this landed.
       #
-      # The tag object is the one thing the runner provably receives: it is
-      # named in the fetch refspec itself. So the notes live there, written at
-      # tag time with `git tag -a v0.1.4 -F docs/releases/v0.1.4.md`. The docs
-      # file stays as the thing a human edits and reads on the web.
+      # There is a second trap, which cost two more runs: `actions/checkout`
+      # fetches the tag *by commit sha* into refs/tags/<tag> (see the
+      # `+<sha>:refs/tags/v0.1.3` in its fetch line). That overwrites the
+      # annotated tag with a lightweight one pointing at the commit, so
+      # `git tag -l` happily reports the commit message as the tag message. The
+      # annotation is still in the object database; it just is not what
+      # `refs/tags/v0.1.3` names any more. Hence the explicit fetch by tag
+      # object sha below, into a namespace checkout cannot collide with.
       - name: Collect release notes
         if: github.ref_type == 'tag'
         run: |
@@ -207,19 +210,30 @@ jobs:
           TAG="${{ github.ref_name }}"
           VERSION=$(grep -m1 '^version' Cargo.toml | sed 's/.*"\(.*\)".*/\1/')
 
-          # Everything after the tag's subject line, with the blank line that
-          # separates them dropped. `%(contents:body)` is not used here: it
-          # also treats any line starting with `#` as a comment, which silently
-          # removed every heading from these notes.
-          NOTES=$(git tag -l --format='%(contents)' "$TAG" 2>/dev/null | tail -n +2 | sed '/./,$!d' || true)
+          NOTES=""
+          TAG_SHA=$(git ls-remote --tags origin "refs/tags/${TAG}" 2>/dev/null | awk '{print $1}')
+          if [ -n "$TAG_SHA" ]; then
+            git fetch -q --depth=1 origin "+${TAG_SHA}:refs/release-notes/${TAG}" 2>/dev/null || true
+            if [ "$(git cat-file -t "refs/release-notes/${TAG}" 2>/dev/null)" = "tag" ]; then
+              # cat-file prints the object verbatim: three header lines, a
+              # blank, then the message. `sed '1,/^$/d'` drops the headers,
+              # `tail -n +2` the one-line subject, and the last sed any blank
+              # line left between them. Format specifiers like %(contents:body)
+              # are avoided because they also treat a `#` line as a comment,
+              # which would delete every heading in these notes.
+              NOTES=$(git cat-file -p "refs/release-notes/${TAG}" \
+                | sed '1,/^$/d' | tail -n +2 | sed '/./,$!d' || true)
+            fi
+          fi
+
           if [ -z "$NOTES" ]; then
             NOTES=$(git show "HEAD:docs/releases/${VERSION}.md" 2>/dev/null || true)
           fi
           if [ -n "$NOTES" ]; then
-            echo "notes: ${#NOTES} bytes from tag ${TAG}"
+            echo "notes: ${#NOTES} bytes from the ${TAG} annotation"
           else
             NOTES=$(printf 'Release %s.\n\nSee the repository README for deployment instructions.' "$VERSION")
-            echo "::warning::tag ${TAG} has no notes body; using a placeholder"
+            echo "::warning::tag ${TAG} carries no notes body; using a placeholder"
           fi
           printf '%s' "$NOTES" > /tmp/notes.md