The Vale Industries archive occupied the entire basement level of a building the company had owned since the sixties, climate-controlled and underused, a long room of steel shelving and acid-free boxes that smelled, faintly and pleasantly, of the same preservation chemicals Wren had spent her career learning to work around. She'd found her way down there four days after the Whitfield lunch, using the excuse Preston's own office had unknowingly handed her — a company history project, timed to coincide with the transition, that needed someone to authenticate a set of founding-era documents before they went into a commemorative volume for the board vote. Nobody had questioned why the future Mrs. Vale wanted to spend her afternoons in a basement instead of at a spa. Nobody, Wren suspected, had
