## Chapter 504 — What Stayed Private By the following morning, the missing letters had acquired the sort of order Crownholt preferred to give impossible things. The archive incident had a restricted file number, the affected stores had been listed separately, and the first report no longer called the event a total loss of correspondence. Voss had crossed that phrase out himself. The Crown had lost the private words; it had not lost the evidence that it had taken possession of them. The difference occupied more of his attention than he liked. On his desk, a paper transcription preserved its header, date, routing marks, reviewing office and custody seal, while the space where Thomas or Isha's words had once been copied held clean paper. A reviewer line survived below, but every quoted fragment and every conclusion that depended on a preserved phrase had vanished. The page looked less damaged than corrected by someone who objected to one category of ownership. An older archive officer sat opposite him with two sealed cases at her feet and a narrow ledger open across her knees. She had already spent most of the morning answering the same questions for three offices, and the repetitions had stripped courtesy down to usefulness. “No additional store changed overnight,” she said. “Paper copies, extracts and magical preservations show the same boundary. Administrative material survives unless the material itself preserved letter content.” Voss turned the transcription towards her and asked whether anyone had tried to recover what was gone. The officer's expression answered before she spoke. One former reviewer had offered to write remembered passages before discussion altered them; another had proposed interviewing surviving staff and comparing recollections against the old analysis headings. She had stopped both until Crown Necessities gave a clearer instruction. “Keep it stopped,” Voss said. He folded his hands over the edge of the desk rather than reaching for the blank page again. “We need to know what changed, whether other records remain reliable, and whether the mechanism can recur. We do not need to manufacture a new Crown copy of private words merely because the old one disappeared.” The officer watched him for a moment, then made a note. “Historical completeness will be the argument against that. So will the fact that memory decays. If someone later asks what was actually written, we may have witnesses today who will not be available then.” “It is an argument,” Voss said, “and a good one. It still does not tell me why the Crown needs the words now. If someone wants reconstruction, they can state the present question, explain why the surviving record cannot answer it, and obtain approval from this office and Chancery separately.” The officer did not immediately write. Her job required her to preserve things other people later discovered they needed, and Voss had just instructed her to allow some recoverable information to become less recoverable with time. The objection was professional rather than sentimental, which made it harder to dismiss. “At what point does waiting become a decision to lose it?” she asked. “A year? Ten? The death of the last reviewer who remembers a particular letter?” Voss looked again at the blank transcription. “Probably before we are comfortable admitting it. But the alternative is to recreate private correspondence because the Crown dislikes not possessing it. I want the future question to carry enough weight that someone is willing to put their name beneath the request.” The officer's pen moved at last. “Separate approval from Crown Necessities and Chancery. Specific present purpose. No general historical reconstruction.” For a few seconds only the scratch of her pen occupied the office. Voss could see the administrative cost being created in real time: future clerks would have to route requests, two offices would have to accept responsibility, and some historian would eventually complain that present discomfort had made the archive less complete. That was preferable to allowing the easiest motive—*we once had these words*—to become sufficient by itself. “Yes. And no interviews framed so broadly that everyone reconstructs the correspondence while insisting they are merely describing context.” That earned him a more direct look. “You have met archivists before.” “I have employed them.” Voss let the answer sit for a moment before looking back to the ledger. The humour stayed brief. She accepted the instruction without pretending it resolved the archival problem, and Voss did not require her to approve of it. The fact of correspondence still mattered to the history of Thomas Albrecht's custody, as did the dates on which letters had been withheld, reviewed and forwarded. Decisions made from those letters also remained in Crown records, sometimes with enough surviving context to make the vanished source material obvious. What had disappeared was the part Crownholt had once treated as both private contact and assessable evidence. Voss asked to see one of the magical records. The officer produced not the original device but a verified reading sheet, since the preservation itself remained sealed below. Activation marks and beginning and end points were intact; between them, the recorded letter content was simply absent. The anomaly had been specific enough to leave the Crown's own scaffolding around the missing words. He remembered the scaffolding. Mood, cooperation, stability, work tolerance, attachment to Isha, changes in sentence length, missed letters, pauses between replies. Some observations had been sensible in isolation. Taken together, they had allowed a monitored relationship to become another instrument for deciding what Thomas could be asked to do next. The officer shifted the ledger on her lap. “Records wants to know whether the originals should be listed as stolen, removed from Crown custody or inaccessible. They would prefer a category which implies a mechanism.” Her tone suggested that preference had already produced more correspondence than the missing letters. “We do not know the means,” Voss said. “We know they are no longer here. Reality has disappointed Records.” The line earned a brief movement at the corner of her mouth, but she did not preserve his phrasing. She entered **missing from Crown custody; means unknown**, underlined the uncertainty, and closed the ledger before asking whether the King should receive the anomaly file now that multiple restricted stores were involved. Voss took longer with that answer. He knew of visits to restricted Crown Deep, Crown Necessities and the assessment side, and the stranger had spoken of changes to Thomas and Isha's former accommodation. As far as Voss knew, no royal chamber had been breached, no public harm had followed, and the archive loss did not alter current Crown operations. Reporting upward merely because the event frightened him would convert uncertainty into royal attention without yet showing what that attention could improve. “Not yet,” he said. “If the scope widens, if someone is endangered, or if a royal decision is actually required, I will brief him.” The officer left with the cases, and Voss remained with the single blank transcription she had permitted him to retain for the working file. Outside his windows the palace had resumed its normal volume: carts in the inner court, clerks moving sealed packets, servants carrying laundry, the low argument of somebody disputing an expenditure. Crownholt continued functioning around an absence which would have consumed the entire day if he allowed it. He opened the private report on yesterday's visitor instead. The sheet still described an unidentified human man of middle years, ordinary in appearance, knowledgeable about Thomas, Isha and Crown Deep, and capable of entering controlled spaces under authority nobody could later identify. It did not contain a name because Voss had never received one. The outer clerk's account remained attached. He remembered accepting the visitor's claim that he was expected, yet could not reconstruct who was meant to be expecting him or why the answer had seemed sufficient at the time. Two guards had given versions of the same problem. Voss had resisted punishing any of them; discipline required a failure a person could reasonably have avoided, and he did not yet know what they had been asked to resist. That uncertainty disturbed him more than the missing paper. If the visitor had altered judgement, memory or circumstance, Voss lacked a method for separating one possibility from another. If he had done none of those things and simply possessed a way to make barriers irrelevant, the practical result was not much more comforting. Voss read his own note from the meeting. The stranger had spoken about five gods, Thomas not being the Hero, the Demon Lord remaining alive somewhere, and power sufficient to change history. Any one claim should have demanded an inquiry. Instead Voss's attention returned to the sentence he had deliberately not written down: the man had come partly to decide whether Voss deserved to suffer. He had understood the anger. Understanding it did not make punishment simple. Dismissal, trial, imprisonment or death could all be made to look like justice from the right distance, but none returned Thomas to the people who had loved him or gave Isha back the weeks in which Crownholt shaped her choices by holding him elsewhere. Voss put the encounter report back in the locked drawer. The visitor might return; he might never return. Voss could not plan usefully around either possibility, but he could decide what his own office would do if the man appeared again. On a fresh sheet he wrote that no attempt at detention was to be made absent an immediate threat, and that no staff member, prisoner or Deep worker was to be exposed deliberately for the purpose of testing the visitor's claims or limits. The instruction felt obvious once written. That made him distrust how long Crownholt had needed to learn certain obvious things. He signed it anyway and left the sheet beside the encounter report until the ink dried. The next file on his desk concerned an upper Deep access route. A maintenance team wanted to keep one corridor open while an adjacent inspection continued; the request described ore movement, shift disruption and transport delays in precise columns, while the people carrying the residual risk appeared only in a staffing line. Nothing in the document was scandalous, and the proposed exposure sat within an accepted table. Voss read the table, then the hazard note, then the names of the crews who would use the route. He wrote one question beneath the recommendation: **If the tolerance assumption is wrong, who bears the consequence and what authority do they have to refuse this route?** After a moment he added that an answer was required before approval, sanded the ink, and sent the file back. It was not a grand correction. Three crews would be inconvenienced, somebody in Deep administration would complain, and nobody would connect the returned requisition to Thomas Albrecht. Voss preferred it that way. --- Arliss Fen began her morning with a different kind of blank. The small plate from Ian's chocolate sat inside her desk drawer beneath two bundles of spare thread and a packet of old ward tags, where she had put it because leaving it visible invited questions about material and provenance. Destroying it would have felt absurdly theatrical. When she opened the drawer for sealing wax, the plate caught the light and pulled yesterday back into the room before she wanted it. Ian was no longer entirely unnamed. A one-word missive had appeared beside her report after he left, remained long enough to be read, and disappeared without troubling any ward she had built or inherited. She had laughed when she understood the joke: he had said he might trust her with his name if she proved she could keep the frost demonstration from Voss, then supplied exactly one piece of identity after she had done so. The name changed surprisingly little and far too much; it gave a human syllable to a problem she had been trying to keep procedural. Arliss took out the wax and left the plate where it was. She had not written the name into her report. She had not added the frost, the chocolate, the impossible disappearance, or the fact that a man with no detectable mana had reproduced a cold effect she knew intimately without using any structure she could perceive. Yesterday she had called that restraint. This morning she was less willing to accept the flattering word without examination. Her original encounter note remained in the locked case beside the desk. It recorded an unknown human man who knew her name before introduction, raised Thomas and Isha, understood the Crown Deep incident and claimed that “reality” was the source of his knowledge. She had added the time, then withheld the page from the outgoing tray. Later, after the private conversation, she had chosen not to expand it. The choice had reasons. Some were professional. Giving Voss an impossible capability would generate interviews, archive comparisons, ward tests and attempts to classify limits. Thomas had once sat in another room while inquiries accumulated around him, each one individually defensible and collectively sufficient to turn a frightened young man into Crown work. Ian could not be treated the same way. Arliss doubted Crownholt possessed a door he could not ignore, and his claim that reality obeyed him had come with the same uncomfortable lack of spectacle as another mage discussing how to open a cabinet. Yet institutional curiosity did not become harmless merely because the object of it could leave. Other reasons were less clean. Ian had listened to her, and the memory irritated Arliss enough that she closed the drawer harder than necessary. He had known her worst connection to Thomas before asking what she could do now, yet when the conversation reached her rank he had seemed genuinely interested in how she had earned A-rank and why ward work mattered to her. Arliss had spent years around people who treated rank as authority, prestige, threat or resource; Ian had asked about the craft, and she had enjoyed answering him. That enjoyment was evidence about Arliss, not about Ian. Personal relief could distort judgement as efficiently as fear, especially when the person offering relief possessed enough power to make gratitude dangerous. The fact that she had felt seen in a way Crownholt rarely allowed did not establish that the man doing the seeing was safe. She could still hear the peculiar bluntness of his farewell test: “I'm not sure I quite trust you enough with my name, maybe after I see you've not told Voss about my power.” Arliss had called it a remarkably specific test of character. At the time she had found the condition funny; this morning it felt more serious because she had passed it without being entirely sure whether passing had been wise. She pulled a blank sheet towards herself and wrote **Ian** at the top. The sight of the name on paper felt wrong immediately, so she struck a single line through it, tore off the narrow strip and fed it into the small brazier used for sealing scraps. Watching the fibres curl black did not erase him; it reminded her that she was choosing what entered Crown records rather than drifting into secrecy because secrecy felt kinder. On the remaining sheet she wrote a different heading: **What present safety problem would disclosure of the withheld observations solve?** The question was deliberately less comfortable than *should I report him*. It forced her to name what the report was meant to accomplish before giving the institution another impossible person to examine. The answer was not *none*. Ian had reached her office without giving her a name, claimed to have removed private correspondence from sealed custody, reproduced magic without a readable channel and disappeared without ward response. Arliss would have failed any junior assessor who summarised that as harmless. She wrote more carefully. Reporting his demonstrated capabilities could help identify him if he returned, warn other offices that ordinary barriers might fail, and prevent staff from assuming a conventional mage problem. It could also produce testing, surveillance, attempts at containment, pressure to find associates, and interest from offices which had no current role except wanting to understand something unprecedented. The line between those outcomes was not fixed, and pretending otherwise would merely hide judgement beneath procedure. Arliss set the sheet aside when someone knocked. A junior assessor entered carrying yesterday's practice-room report, the one in which she had crossed out *probably harmless* and written *unresolved*. He remained standing until she pointed to the chair, then placed the revised page between them with the wary care of someone submitting work after discovering that three words could reopen a room closure. He had done more than replace the adjective. The new recommendation stated that the boundary distortion had appeared twice under the original load, failed to appear under a reduced standard repetition, and therefore remained unexplained. He recommended keeping the room out of ordinary rotation until the first condition could be reproduced safely or the discrepancy accounted for. Arliss read the paragraph twice before looking up. “Better. You have described what happened instead of guessing what the final test means. Why did you reduce the load for the last repetition?” “Because the first two distortions were stronger than I expected.” The assessor sat straighter once the question became technical. “I wanted to know whether the boundary itself was failing or whether the load was driving it past tolerance. Under the reduced load it held cleanly three times.” “That tells you something useful,” Arliss said. “It tells you the reduced condition did not reproduce the fault. Why did you write *probably harmless* rather than *load-sensitive* or *cause unresolved*?” Arliss let him think before asking another question. The report had been competent up to the conclusion, and she did not want the young man learning that uncertainty was something senior assessors solved by supplying the preferred adjective. Outside the office, a cart rolled through the working passage towards the lower halls; the room in question would affect schedules, but nobody was waiting for an answer in the next breath. He looked back at his first draft as though the phrase had been written by somebody slightly less competent. “Because if the room is only used under standard load, the fault may never matter. Practice has two groups waiting for the space, and the final test matched the condition they normally use.” The argument was not foolish. Rooms existed to be used, risk tables existed because nobody could reduce uncertainty to zero, and closing every space that behaved unexpectedly would eventually close the palace. What mattered was where the uncertainty went when the room reopened. “The room may be fine,” she said. “Closing it may prove unnecessary. But the last test changed the condition which produced the problem, so it cannot establish that the original condition was harmless. If Practice wants ordinary use at the reduced load, give me a written operating limit based on those tests and show me how they will keep within it. Until that is approved, the room stays closed. If they want the higher condition available, give me a safe test plan or a written acceptance of the unresolved risk by someone who has authority over that work.” The assessor read the revised recommendation again, then nodded. “So the closure is not a finding that every use is dangerous. It is because there are no approved limits for reopening it yet.” “Yes.” Arliss pushed the sheet back to him. “That sentence is better than *probably harmless*. Put it in the report if it remains true after you check the numbers.” He spent another moment over the figures, apparently testing the sentence against the actual report instead of merely accepting hers. Arliss approved of that more than she showed. A junior assessor who learned to replace his uncertainty with a senior person's certainty had learned the wrong lesson efficiently. When he gathered the pages, he paused before standing. “Assessor Fen, was this because of the old Crown Deep collapse? People say you became much stricter about uncertainty after it.” “Partly,” Arliss said. The question had been asked seriously, so she did not punish him with vagueness. “Mostly it comes from disliking language which moves uncertainty onto somebody else without saying so. If we do not know, write that we do not know. If we choose to proceed anyway, write who is choosing and what they are accepting.” The question lingered after she answered it. Arliss had changed after the collapse, but not in the clean way younger staff sometimes imagined; she had not received one lesson and become careful. What remained was a series of smaller habits: asking who carried uncertainty, noticing when convenience had dressed itself as evidence, and distrusting conclusions which arrived more quickly than the work behind them. The young man considered that, then tucked the report under his arm. “Practice will still complain.” Arliss looked at the corrected recommendation, then at him. The complaint was likely to arrive in her office rather than his, which made the answer easier. “Then they have understood the recommendation.” He left with a reluctant smile. Arliss watched the door close and looked back at her disclosure sheet; the ward report had answered one part of it more cleanly than any meditation on Ian had managed. *Unknown* was not the same as *safe*, but it was also not permission to test whatever one wished until the unknown became legible. Ian made both errors tempting because he was both obviously dangerous and maddeningly easy to speak with. Arliss retrieved the plate from the drawer and set it on the desk, remembering his amusement when she called the chocolate unnecessarily complicated and the irritation in his voice when he admitted that absolute power did not make difficult choices simple. She had liked him more for the irritation than she would have liked a polished answer. Earlier, when he had described her as “not as bad as him and not as good as others,” Arliss had called it the strangest performance assessment she had ever received and warned him not to lean too heavily on *not as bad*. Ian had not argued her towards absolution; he had moved on to the harder question of Voss, the King and what justice could mean when punishment could create more victims. That still proved nothing about Ian's safety, but it told Arliss something about why she was tempted to grant him more trust than the evidence justified. He had allowed her to remain culpable without requiring that culpability to become her entire identity, and the relief of that was dangerous precisely because it was real. Naming the temptation made it easier to keep separate from the assessment. She leaned back and considered the man rather than the capabilities. He appeared human, middle-aged and physically unremarkable. No mana pressure accompanied him. No mage sense found hidden reserves. He could be petty enough to enjoy chocolate, awkward enough to withhold his name as a test, angry enough to contemplate Voss's suffering, and uncertain enough to admit that taking the letters simply felt good. Those limits might be genuine, or they might be the presentation of a being whose real limits Arliss could not see. The uncertainty mattered, but not in the direction Crownholt had once preferred. Thomas had also looked like a person before the institution made his category more important than the fact, and Arliss had no wish to repeat that error merely because Ian's category was larger. She closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them to the disclosure sheet. Deciding Ian was safe because he had been personable would be foolish; deciding his personhood was secondary until every dangerous capacity had been mapped would be familiar in a worse way. The assessment had to leave room for both facts at once. She wrote three conditions beneath the original question. She would report the withheld capability if Ian harmed or threatened someone, if another person faced a material risk which her silence would worsen, or if Ian himself asked for institutional action which made the information relevant. She would reconsider if new evidence altered the balance. She added one final line beneath the conditions: **Do not disclose solely to satisfy institutional curiosity.** The sentence looked less impressive than the effort required to reach it, which Arliss preferred. She folded the sheet around her original encounter note and returned both to the locked case; Ian's name went nowhere inside it, and the decision remained explicitly revisable if the risks changed. --- Voss considered summoning Arliss twice that morning. An archive clerk reminded him that the unidentified visitor had been seen in the mage-administration corridor before appearing in Crown Necessities, and Arliss now worked only a short distance from that route. Later, while rereading the guards' accounts, Voss wondered whether a ward assessor might see something in the access anomaly his own staff had missed. He still did not send the summons. Arliss was relevant, but asking the question would create its own evidence pressure: once called into Crown Necessities, she could reasonably assume that every observation about the stranger belonged to the investigation. Voss had spent enough years building review structures around custody to know that process could manufacture obligations as efficiently as commands. If the anomaly widened or the visitor returned, he would ask. For now, he had enough evidence from people already inside the inquiry, and leaving Arliss outside it felt less like trust than restraint. Voss found the distinction irritating, which was usually a sign that it deserved to survive another day. By midday the maintenance requisition he had returned came back with a revised route plan. The Deep office had identified the shift leader authorised to stop work if observed conditions exceeded the stated assumptions, shortened the operating window, and added a second inspection point. None of the changes transformed the job; they simply made the residual risk belong to people who could see it and act. Voss approved the plan and felt no particular moral improvement as a result, which was useful in its own way. --- Arliss learned about the archive restriction through a circular just after lunch. The notice went to historical reviewers and staff whose work had touched the Albrecht correspondence, forbidding reconstruction of missing wording, comparison of memories for the purpose of recreating letters, or solicitation of recollections without specific approval. Existing memories were not under investigation; staff were to report only newly observed changes to records or storage media. She read the circular twice. Ian had done what he said, and on a scale broad enough for Voss to formalise the aftermath: preserved content had disappeared while the memories of people like Arliss remained available and inconvenient. The specificity of the result bothered her professionally and relieved her personally, which was exactly the combination she distrusted. Fragments of letters came back without effort. Isha had described a room whose comfort never made it freedom; Thomas had sometimes written so little that exhaustion was visible in the space around the words. Other letters had carried useful observations beside affection the Crown had no right to treat as an assessment variable. Arliss could probably recover more if she deliberately tried, so she folded the circular and did not try. Yesterday Ian had taken the originals because, in his own words, it felt like something. Arliss had challenged neither the feeling nor the inadequacy of it. Crownholt had no continuing need for Thomas and Isha's private sentences. That remained true even if the removal itself had been unilateral and impossible. A harder question followed: did her memory count as another Crown copy? Arliss decided it did not unless she chose to turn recollection into a record. Ian had removed content without erasing the people who had participated in Crownholt's decisions; whether that selectivity came from restraint, limitation or some mechanism she could not imagine, he had left remorse intact. Her eyes moved to the locked case. Writing Ian's name would not force anyone to reconstruct Thomas's letters, and reporting the frost would not automatically produce detention, but the situations still resembled each other uncomfortably. In both, an institution could claim information simply because it had gained access to the person carrying it. Arliss turned the circular over, left the back blank, and listened for a moment to ordinary corridor noise while the palace remained unaware that she was deciding anything important. She opened the drawer and took out the plate again, then immediately felt foolish for using it as if it were an oracle. The object had no opinion; it was simply evidence that Ian had been in her office and had chosen, for reasons of his own, to give her food. She ran one thumb along the rim and remembered that he had said perhaps they would meet again. Arliss wanted that. She did not bother dressing the admission as professional curiosity: she wanted to know what he would ask next, whether his impossible power would remain as irritatingly disconnected from his ordinary uncertainty as it had been yesterday, and whether he would bring more chocolate. His farewell had been almost offensively casual after everything else—“Nice to meet you, maybe we'll meet again”—and Arliss had answered that she hoped any next meeting would happen under less historical circumstances. More importantly, she still wanted the next meeting to happen because Ian chose to come rather than because Crown Necessities assembled enough information to hunt for him. The preference was personal, but the boundary around disclosure could not depend on personal preference alone. If she was going to keep his capabilities private, she needed reasons which would remain defensible even if the next conversation disappointed her. Arliss returned the plate to the drawer and closed it; the threshold she had written earlier still held on safety grounds without personal preference being asked to justify it. --- Late in the afternoon, Voss received the ward-assessment recommendation Arliss had corrected. He recognised her hand in the margin before reaching her signature: the revision distinguished absence of recurrence under a reduced load from evidence that the original condition was harmless. The room remained closed. A lower-load reopening required an approved operating limit, and none had yet been submitted. The higher load still required a safe test plan or an authorised acceptance of the unresolved risk. Years ago, Voss might have called the recommendation overcautious and approved the room for restricted use. Perhaps he still would have if the operational cost were larger; institutions did not become ethical by refusing every risk. Here, the cost was another room and some rescheduling, so he signed beneath Arliss's recommendation and sent it onward without asking why she had sharpened the language. The archive file remained locked in his drawer, the visitor remained unnamed, and Crownholt remained functional. None of those facts closed the problem. Voss moved to the next file because the palace had always been very good at continuing while important questions remained unresolved. --- Arliss stayed later than she intended. As the corridor thinned and the lower lamps took over from daylight, she finished two routine reviews, returned one badly drawn ward diagram for clarification, and discovered that the plate in her drawer had become more distracting after she admitted she wanted Ian to return. She took it out again. The absurdity of the object helped. A man who claimed reality obeyed him had left a small plate behind because he wanted somewhere to put chocolate; Arliss had hidden it because explaining the material would be inconvenient, then spent most of a day treating it as evidence in an argument with herself. She smiled and murmured, “Still unnecessarily complicated,” to an office which had no useful answer. Instead of returning the plate to the drawer, she placed it on a shelf behind her desk. If someone asked, she could say it was a gift, which was true and sufficient for an object whose private history did not affect their safety. Arliss resisted turning the choice into a principle and checked the locked case once more. Ian's name was still absent from the report, and the disclosure conditions she had written remained inside. Nothing that had happened since morning required her to change them; wanting another conversation with him was still a personal preference, not evidence that he was harmless, and keeping the distinction explicit was precisely why she could trust herself to have the preference at all. She put on her cloak and extinguished the desk lamp. Before leaving, she glanced back towards the shelf. The plate was no longer empty. A fresh piece of chocolate rested at its centre. Beside it lay a small missive, folded once and otherwise unmarked. Arliss crossed the room slowly, though there was nothing in the office to suggest an intruder had entered, and opened the paper. > I would like to talk to you again, if this is acceptable, write on the back of this, then sign it. For several seconds she simply held it. The arrival itself was another demonstration of exactly the problem she had spent the day considering: Ian could reach into a controlled place without using any route she understood. Yet he had not appeared in her office, demanded an answer or treated her earlier interest as permission. He had left a question and made the next movement hers. Arliss looked towards the locked case, then back to the note. The threshold she had written that morning did not change. There was still no institutional safety reason to report him, and there was now a personal decision which did not need to become an institutional one merely because Crownholt would have found it interesting. She turned the missive over. **Yes. I would like that. Preferably under less historical circumstances.** Arliss signed her name beneath the line. The paper vanished as the final stroke left the pen, leaving the fresh chocolate on the plate and the office otherwise exactly as it had been. She looked at the empty place where the missive had rested, then picked up the chocolate. Whatever the next conversation became, it would begin because both of them had chosen to have it.