Saturday night I took the long sheet out again.I hadn't meant to. Sophia had gone back to the hotel with her bag and her borrowed voice, and I had told her I would try to sleep. Instead I cleared the table, set the sheet down flat under the lamp, and added what I'd been given that afternoon. A tired man on the telephone. *Hale and Richard Cole should never have been in the same file.* I wrote it in the middle column, between Marcus's name and my grandfather's, and left the date blank, because the man hadn't given one.I read the sheet from left to right and then from right to left. It still held together. It was the part at the bottom that wouldn't.---I had always known the lilies were the weak point.Everything else on the page had a reason, even if the reason was buried. The transfer into Northgate had an account number. The photograph had two men in it, and the letter had a signature. Marcus had a firm that had been dissolved and a face half a step behind Victor in the sun. Even

Sophia's phone rang at a quarter to nine that night, while we were still in her office with the lamp on and the blinds drawn.We'd been trying to work. Neither of us had managed more than a few lines. The ledger lay open under her hand, and I had a report I'd read four times without taking in a word of it. When the phone began to buzz against the desk, we both looked at it at the same moment.The screen showed a number I didn't know. Sophia didn't know it either."It could be anyone," she said."It could."She stared at it for another ring. Then she picked it up and pressed the button for the speaker, and looked at me, and I nodded."Hello?"There was no answer. I could hear a faint hollow sound, like a room with a high ceiling, and under it something that might have been breathing."Hello?" Sophia said again, quieter."Sophia." It was barely a voice. "Darling, don't say my name."Sophia's hand went flat against her mouth. I saw her eyes close and open again."I won't," she said."I h

Nakamura came to my office on Wednesday morning with a coffee in each hand.That alone was strange. In all the months I'd known him, he had never once brought me anything he hadn't first itemized. He set one cup on my desk, held the other, and stood there with his usual stiff courtesy while I thanked him."I won't take much of your time, Mr. Cole.""Sit, please."He didn't. "I have two small things. I'm not certain either is worth your attention. I'd rather you decided that than I.""Go on.""The first is a records memo." He set his cup down, finally, and took a folded paper from his jacket. "It came to my desk for information on Monday. Mr. Hale has revised the document retention schedule. The period for legacy correspondence and internal working files has been shortened. Considerably."I took the paper. It was one page, signed in Marcus's elegant hand, and it said what Nakamura had said in four dry paragraphs. Files older than a certain age, not otherwise flagged by legal, would be

I didn't telephone, and I didn't follow her.I waited where I'd said I would, close enough to reach her within minutes, far enough that no one could connect me to that street. I'd chosen the spot that morning and told no one but Bishop. I stood under a weak light and watched the evening empty out around me, one window going dark after another, and I looked at my watch more often than a man should.At eight twenty, Bishop's man sent a short message. *Dinner is under way. Principal seated.*At nine, another. *Second course. No movement.*I answered neither. I had promised her I wouldn't interrupt, and I'd found that the promise covered more than telephone calls. It covered the urge to ask whether she was all right, and the urge to rehearse what I'd say if she wasn't. Both were louder than I'd expected. Neither made the minutes go faster.At ten past ten, my phone lit with a number I knew by heart, and I answered before the first ring finished."Ethan." It was barely a whisper. "I can't

The text arrived at twenty to four.I'd been standing so long that the cold had stopped registering as cold and become a kind of flat, dry ache. My feet had gone somewhere past feeling. I'd walked the length of the street three times since three o'clock and stood under the lamp for the last quarter of an hour with my hands pushed deep in my coat pockets, watching the dark pane of a window across the road and thinking about nothing at all.When the phone buzzed against my leg, I nearly dropped it.The number was the one I'd been looking at for the better part of a year. It had been silent for almost a fortnight.*You're waiting in the right place.*I stared at the screen. The light of it felt very bright in that dark street.Another message followed before I could answer.*She's closer to saying it than she has ever been. But that isn't what I wanted to tell you.*I typed with fingers that wouldn't quite obey me. *What did you want to tell me?*The dots appeared. They stayed a long tim