The Iron Crest archive took Theo four hours.
He drove back the same day, left Crimson Ridge at noon, arrived at Iron Crest by three, spent the afternoon in the pack archive with the historian who had been at Iron Crest for thirty-one years and who had, it turned out, been waiting for someone to ask about the records from the year before Damon's parents died with the specific patient quality of a man who had filed something significant and had always understood that its significance would eventually require retrieval.
Theo called at seven.
I was in the kitchen. Damon was at the table. Vera was in the east sitting room with her documents, which was where she spent most evenings now, the old volumes spread across the writing desk in the specific organised arrangement of someone who had bee
