The name sat in the kitchen the way names sat in rooms when they carried more weight than names usually carried.
Vera.
I did not know the name. I had never heard it in any of the conversations I had gathered from corridors and doorways and the peripheral edges of rooms I was not supposed to be paying attention to. It did not appear in any of the documents we had assembled, did not connect to any of the threads we had been pulling since the archive room and the locked drawer and the physician in Portland with his eighteen-year-old box.
It was a new thread.
I looked at Damon.
He was looking at Theo with the flat controlled attention of a man who had just had something confirmed that he had been sitting with, unsaid, for longer than this morning. The controlled attention was working hard
