She told him that evening.
He came for dinner — he came most Fridays now, the specific regular rhythm that had assembled itself over the past year without being explicitly planned, the way good things often assembled themselves when the conditions were right. He came on Fridays and Rosa made too much food and Diana came down from the north building and Luca was there and the specific improbable family of them sat around the kitchen table and ate together.
But this was Monday. She had called and asked him to come and he had come.
He sat across from her in the consultancy office — just the two of them, which was deliberate — and she told him what she had found. Calmly and directly, the way she told him things. The Merritt connection. The bridge entity. The 2014 ledger. The specific confir
