He knocked on the door of my kitchen.
The gesture still mattered — Zane had been in the compound long enough for the East Wing study to become his natural habitat, long enough that Maren treated him with the specific ease of someone working alongside a colleague rather than accommodating a guest, long enough that his thirty-two drives were arranged in the archive with the careful organizational logic of a man who had been thinking about this system for years. But he knocked on my kitchen door.
Because it was my kitchen.
"Come in," I said.
He came in. He had a single folder — not Maren's style of folder, not the dense document of accumulated research. Something thinner. The specific thinness of a man who has found less than he hoped for and is being honest about it.
He sat across from
