It happened in the corridor outside the archive room.
Not the east wing — the main corridor on the second floor, the one that connected my new room to the staircase, the one I had been walking three or four times a day for the past week and had mapped so thoroughly I could have navigated it in the dark.
Which was, I realized afterward, exactly what Sebastian had been doing for three years.
It was past eleven. I had been in the archive room — the one beside the Hart archive, the Vale Corp financial records — for four hours, following a thread from Thomas's preliminary document that I hadn't fully resolved and couldn't leave alone. Reed had brought food at some point, set it beside me without comment, taken the empty plate away an hour later with the same silence.
When I finally came out
