Chapter 12: The Signature

I found him in the records room at one o'clock.

The steel door was propped open with a box.

He sat on the cement floor under the bare bulb with the HOLD drawer open beside him.

There was a binder across his knees, thick and black, with a Marlowe Group logo on the spine.

I had seen that binder once before, in a conference room, at midnight.

"Cullen."

He didn't look up.

"It was on the bottom shelf," he said. "Behind the boxes."

He tapped the cover.

"The integration closing set. Somebody filed it with the personnel records."

"Can I come in?"

"It's your building."

That hurt more than I had expected.

I came in anyway and stopped three feet away.

He turned a page.

He turned another, slowly.

"I want to tell you what I thought, upstairs," he said. "When you stood at that podium."

"Tell me."

"I thought, she lied to me for eight days."

"Cullen, I..."

"Let me finish."

I closed my mouth.

"I thought, she knew who she was the whole time."

"I didn't know who had done it."

"But you knew who you were."

"Yes."

"And you let me go on calling you Dara."

I made myself hold his gaze.

"Yes."

He nodded as if I'd confirmed a measurement.

"And I thought, fine. She had a reason."

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