Evie arrived the night before looking like someone who had been awake since four am and was managing it through force of professional will.
She had a bag, three notebooks, and the folder — the annotated one, the one she'd carried to bay four twice. Nara recognised it immediately. She'd had it for two years. It showed.
"You brought the original folder," Nara said.
"I always bring it," Evie said. "It's a calibration tool."
"You use the folder to calibrate yourself before presentations."
"I look at the original annotations," she said. "They remind me where it started. What the question was before I knew the answer." She set it on the table. "It helps me remember I'm not presenting conclusions. I'm presenting a question that got answered."
Nara looked at the folder.
At the margins of th
