Identity verification webhooks: persist pending state and deadlines before waiting

An onboarding service that creates a hosted identity verification session must wait for a provider webhook, which can be disrupted by a process restart or a callback that never arrives. Keeping pending state only in memory risks losing it on restart, and without a deadline a missing callback can leave users stuck or tempt teams to treat silence as approval. The guide's rule is to store pending state and a deadline, then recover through bounded retries, an authorized status refresh, or human review, never by assuming success. A downloadable example uses SQLite to demonstrate persistence and local expiry, showing that a restarted process resumes the same session and that expired sessions stay expired even if a late callback arrives. The example does not cover provider signature validation or status reconciliation, which production systems must implement separately.