I have a flow that includes Update a Record in a Feature Layer that looks like this:

ParagonID is a string field and records are guaranteed unique. the value of "096" returns a unique record from the feature layer. When the flow executes I get the following:

In other words, somewhere, under the hood, the string "096" is getting converted to a numerical 96. Fail.
My Question: How to enforce that a string is getting passed to the task? I've tried '096', \096, "096" string(096) and a few other variations.
TIA