Then I looked at Dominic.
He was already looking at me. His expression had the careful quality again, not withholding, but attending. Waiting for me to arrive at the thing he had just arrived at.
"He left it for your father," I said.
"Yes." His voice was very quiet.
"D.C., Dominic..."
"My father. Dominic Charles Moreau." A pause. "He died six years ago. He never came for it."
I looked at the page. At the date. At Thomas Reyes's handwriting, dense and precise and asking, across seventeen years, for someone to finish the thing he had started.
If this is found by anyone other than D.C., I ask only that they finish it.
Anyone.
I was anyone.
* * *
I stood at the workbench for a long moment. I wasn’t processing anymore. I was past it. On the other side of it, where the information had already been absorbed and what remained was only the feeling underneath. The thing I had been managing carefully for seven weeks. And now, in this room, in the dark, holding a photograph of my mother at twenty-five years old, I could no longer manage it.
My mother had not been collateral damage.
My mother had been deliberate. Had chosen deliberately. Had looked at something dangerous and decided to document it anyway, and had done so for three years with the methodical care of someone who understood that the record mattered even if nothing else came of it.
I thought: I have my eyes. I did not know I had anything else.
I thought: I was doing what I do. I was doing it before I knew what it was.
I didn't say either of those things. I folded the pages carefully, put them back in the envelope, picked up the flash drive in its sealed bag, picked up the photograph. I held the photograph for one more moment.
Then I put it in the envelope with the pages and held the envelope against my chest briefly, a gesture that was not planned and that I didn't examine, and then put it in my jacket pocket.
"Avery," Dominic said.
I turned.
He was looking at me with an expression I didn't have a category for, something that had been assembled from concern and recognition and something older than both of them. He took one step forward, and I understood the step was a question.
I answered it by closing the remaining distance myself.
It wasn't the garden, it wasn't tentative, it wasn't charged with the uncertainty of something that hadn't happened yet. It was just him and me and the dark room and the envelope in my pocket and the flash drive in my hand, and I put my head against his shoulder for approximately thirty seconds and he put his hand at the back of my head the way someone holds something they are being careful not to break.
Thirty seconds.
Then I stepped back.
I was not going to fall apart. I was not going to fall apart because my mother hadn't, and that seemed like the right model.
"Let's go," I said.
He looked at me for a moment longer. Then nodded.
I put the flash drive in my other pocket.
They turned off the flashlights and went back down the stairs and out into the night, and the door locked behind them, and the building went back to looking like nothing.