"She looked at it," Aiden said. "Three seconds. Her hand moved before her face moved. She set down the small pen she had been holding for the procedural exchange and folded her hands in her lap, the way a person folded their hands when they had decided not to continue performing a posture they had been performing. Her face changed. Slowly. The professional calm did not break — it dissolved. Something else came through. I am not sure what to call it. Recognition, possibly. Or the end of a long denial. Forty-two years of institutional performance held in place around a piece of work she now understood had been built on a document she had spent her career hiding. Orvyn did not press. He waited. She read the parchment for approximately forty seconds. Then she lifted her eyes."
"What did she say."
