He had cleared the storage beyond the archive's eastern wall.
I had not known this was happening. He had arranged it himself, directing the work through a packhouse staff member who apparently understood that discretion was part of the assignment, and the eastern wall of the archive had simply, one morning, been opened up into something new.
The room was not large. That had been deliberate, I understood immediately upon seeing it. Large would have been wrong. Large would have been a statement rather than a gift. What he had made instead was small and specific, with the proportions of a room that was meant to be inhabited rather than impressed by, low shelves along two walls, a window placed to catch the morning light at the angle that fell across the east wing garden he had designed on t
