His study was empty.
She stood in the doorway and looked at his desk, the audit folder still there, the red pencil lying across it, his handwriting in the margins of a document he'd left open, and felt the specific deflation of arriving somewhere with something urgent to say and finding no one to say it to.
She went back to her wing. Sat at her desk. Told herself she'd go back in an hour.
An hour became the whole of the next day. She had a board session at nine that ran past noon. Rowan had back-to-back calls through the afternoon and was on a conference with New York by the time she was free. By evening she had convinced herself she should wait until she had the absolute last piece from Maya, who was still working on the outer routing layer, who had sent two brief updates saying close,
