Though the distinction dissolved the moment she opened the first drawer, she told herself it was due diligence, the kind any careful executive owed her company, when unexplained names surfaced beside unexplained money. She told herself this, even as her pulse quickened with every drawer she opened, even as the rational half of her mind warned that a woman in her position had no business rifling through an employes's belongings alone after midnight. She pulled a brown envelope from the hidden space, and even in the dim light, Darius could see the ink had faded to the color of old tea. Her hand trembled slightly as she turned it over, and for a moment the two of them existed in the same fragile silence, though only one of them knew it. She began to lift the flap.
That was when Darius finally spoke, his voice low and even, carrying just far enough to fill the room without startling her into panic. "What are you looking for?" he asked, and Viven turned so fast that her shoulder struck the edge of the desk. She did not apologize. She did not explain herself the way most people would have, stammering about a misplaced file or a late night audit. Instead, she held the envelope slightly away from her body, as though it might be evidence in a courtroom, and studied him with an expression that mixed suspicion with something closer to fear.
She asked him whether he recognized it, and Darius said that he did. She asked why it was hidden in his desk of all places in a company of nearly 4,000 employees in an office he had occupied for barely 3 years. Darius told her that the person who had placed it there had wanted him to find it. And when she asked who that person was, he did not answer. He crossed the room and took the envelope from her hand gently enough that she did not resist.
And in the instant before he tucked it beneath his arm, Vivienne caught a glimpse of a photograph tucked inside, its corner worn soft from handling, she recognized the man standing beside the stranger in the picture immediately because she had grown up looking at that same face across a hundred dinner tables. It was her father, decades younger, standing shoulderto-shoulder with a man she had never once heard him mention in 37 years of life. The next morning, Vivien summoned Darius to her office before the rest of the floor had even finished its first pot of coffee. There was no assistant present, no lawyer stationed near the door, nothing of the ceremony that usually surrounded a conversation with the chief executive. She placed the photograph on the polished surface of her desk and slid it toward him without a word of greeting.