“Three thirty this afternoon, in my office.

Bring the box.”

“What happens at three thirty?”

“Charles left one more instruction, and it isn’t mine to read out standing in a hallway.” He checked the clasp on his briefcase and got it on the first try.

“There’s a sealed envelope at the bottom of that box with your name on it.

I don’t open envelopes in hallways.”

I went back to my old desk on the third floor to collect whatever I had left in the drawer, and I sat down and opened Charles’s notebook to the back page.

Six names were written there in pencil with dates next to them, in that slow, careful handwriting, all of them people who had worked under Derek and all of them gone from the company now.