"So did you." He didn't look up from the papers. "Different kind."
She watched him for a moment. The lamp on the table made the room close and amber. Outside, the snow had stopped. The street was perfectly quiet.
"Why are you helping me?" she asked.
He considered the question with the same care he gave everything. "Because you needed help," he said. "And I was there."
"That's not enough of a reason."
He looked up then. "It is for me."
She held his gaze for a moment, then looked away, back at the papers. "The people who should have been there weren't," she said.
"That happens," he said. "To everyone, eventually. The people you built your systems around turn out to have been building different systems the whole time."
She was quiet. Then, carefully, "Does that make you afraid of building them again?"
He thought about Lily, asleep in the next room, about Mrs. Alderson with her crossword puzzles, about the specific, modest warmth of a life assembled from small, trustworthy pieces. "No," he said. "It makes me more careful about what I build them out of."
At 5:00 a.m., Lily appeared again in the hallway. She looked at the papers on the table, at the two adults who were both clearly not going to bed, and made a quick decision.
"Can I have cereal?" she asked.
"Yes," Ethan said.
She got herself a bowl and a spoon and sat at the counter without requiring anything from either of them. She ate her cereal. She watched her father work. She looked at Sophia once and gave her a small, solemn nod. The nod of someone who had assessed the situation and found it acceptable. Sophia nodded back.
At 5:40, Ethan stacked the papers neatly and looked at her. "Ready?" he said.
"No," she said honestly, "but yes."
Diane Forsyth was waiting in the loading dock entrance at the back of the Aldridge Building, a tall woman in her 50s, gray-streaked hair pulled back, overcoat over what appeared to be her overnight clothes. She looked at Sophia, then at Ethan, and said nothing about either.
"I've been in the building since 5:30," she said. "Webb's assistant sent a calendar update at midnight pushing the start of the session to 8:45. Whoever scheduled that didn't want anyone to have time to react."
"What's the current attendee list?" Sophia asked.
Diane handed her a printed page. Sophia scanned it. Ethan watched her face.
"Seven of nine," she said. "Webb's block."
"That's what I counted," Diane said.
"Arthur Reyes?"
"Not on the list. He wasn't informed of the revised time."
Sophia looked at Ethan. Arthur Reyes. She'd mentioned him during their kitchen table session, board member from the founding days, old enough to have been colleagues with her father, the kind of institutional weight that meant something in a room.
"Can you reach him?" Ethan asked.
"I already did," Diane said. "He'll be here at 8:30."
She led them through the service corridor, past stacked equipment and the institutional smell of cleaning product and old carpeting. Ethan had been in this building before, not the upper floors, but the infrastructure level, during the Meridian Systems engagement. He remembered the layout without trying to. Server room on sub-level two, communications hub off the east corridor, IT administration behind the frosted-glass panel near the second elevator bank.
They took a service elevator to the 32nd floor. The executive suite at this hour was lit only by the ambient overflow from surrounding offices, pale, lateral light that made the space feel unfinished, like a stage set before the performance. Conference chairs arranged in the boardroom. Water glasses set out. A projector system already initialized, ready. Ready for what they'd planned.
"Ethan," Sophia said quietly, "the communications records. Are they recoverable from the server logs?"
"Already requested access," Diane said, glancing at him. "Your clearance code from the Meridian engagement is technically still in the system. No one thought to revoke it."
He looked at her. She looked back without expression.
"That's thorough," he said.
"That's my job," she said.
He sat down at the secondary workstation in the executive assistant's alcove. The system was older than he'd have chosen, but functional. He worked without commentary, with the focused quiet of someone navigating terrain they knew well. Sophia stood to his left, reading over the document Diane had provided, occasionally asking questions he answered without looking up.
By 8:15, they had it. The email chain dated back 11 months. The coordination with Garrity specific, documented, timestamped. The conversation in which Webb had outlined the succession mechanism, the reply in which his co-conspirator had confirmed the vacancy clause and estimated the vote count, and the message sent 48 hours ago that confirmed the off-site arrangement for Sophia and gave the driver, Webb's personal driver, it turned out, specific instructions.
Ethan printed four copies, handed one to Diane, kept one, folded the others.
"Is it enough?" Sophia asked.
"It's more than enough," Diane said. "The question is how you want to use it."