It was his brother, alive, six years after Daniel had buried an empty box.

The officers took the two men before they could do him any serious harm, moving fast in the dim wet space, and then it was over, and Andrew Whitmore was standing in a warehouse in the rain, staring at the brother he had abandoned to grief.

They had reached him with almost nothing to spare.

Daniel would think, later, about the thinness of the margin — how the note said Friday, how it was Friday, how another hour, perhaps less, and the two men would have been finished with their questioning and moved on to whatever they had been sent to do, and Andrew would have vanished a second time, permanently, into an unmarked place from which no note or map or brother could ever have recovered him.

The whole rescue had hung, like everything else in this story, on a chain of the narrowest chances: on Maria finding the payment records, on her surviving the mirror, on Daniel finding the note among the belongings Vanessa tried to remove, on the storm not closing the roads north, on the officers moving fast enough in a dark warehouse.