Lena told me on Tuesday morning.
Not directly. Not in the kitchen at four with two cups of coffee the way our new arrangement had been operating, the specific careful alliance of two women who had ended up on the same side of something neither of them had chosen to be inside. She told me in the way she told me most useful things, which was obliquely, in the corridor, in passing, in the register of a woman who had learned from her father that information delivered casually was information that couldn't be traced back to the delivery.
She was coming out of the west wing at six forty-five when I was coming out of the linen room with an armful of towels and she fell into step beside me for the length of the corridor in the way of two people who happened to be going the same direction.
"My f
