Then he said, “Go to the tenth-floor library. It’s usually empty. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”
I gathered my bag, the folder pressed tight beneath my arm, and walked toward the elevators with my heartbeat pounding in my ears.
The tenth-floor library was one of Northstar’s stranger luxuries. It had been designed, according to company lore, by Nathan’s father himself—a quiet reading room with walnut shelves, leather chairs, and a long table beneath brass lamps. No one used it much anymore. The modern teams preferred open lounges and whiteboards. The library felt like a room from another life, one that had survived because nobody had the heart to remove it.
When I entered, the lights came on automatically.
The shelves glowed warm gold. Rain tapped softly against the windows. For one unsteady moment, I wanted to sit in one of the armchairs and pretend I had come here to read, not to discover that my name had been planted in a dead man’s final night.
Nathan arrived four minutes later.
He was not wearing his suit jacket, and his tie was loosened, as if he had left a meeting in the middle of a sentence. The moment he saw my face, he stopped.
“What is it?”
I handed him the page.
He read the printed message first.
Then his eyes moved down to the visitor log.
The change in him was small but unmistakable.
His face did not go pale. He did not curse or demand an explanation. Nathan Carter had spent too many years learning how not to react.
But his fingers tightened around the paper.
And for the first time since I had known him, I saw fear reach his eyes before he could hide it.
“You recognize this,” I said.
He looked up.
“Not this copy,” he said slowly. “But yes. I know the log.”
“Why is my name on it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t say that because it’s easy.”
His expression tightened, but he did not look away.
“I’m saying it because it’s true.”
The room went very still.
I crossed my arms, partly because I was cold, partly because I needed something to hold together.
“Three years ago, I didn’t know you. I didn’t know your father. I wasn’t connected to Northstar.”
Nathan stared down at the page again.
“The night my father died,” he said, “was chaos.”
His voice had changed. It was lower now, almost distant, as though he were speaking from the far side of a memory.
“He had been ill for months, but he kept it private. Only a few people knew how serious it was. That night, the hospital called around seven. They said he had taken a sudden turn.”
I pictured him younger by three years, not yet the myth employees whispered about. A son in a car speeding toward a hospital. A man not yet ready to become the person everyone expected him to be.
“I arrived first,” Nathan continued. “Celeste arrived shortly after. A board advisor came. A hospital administrator. A few others. I remember signing in because the nurse insisted. Everything else is…” He paused. “Fragmented.”
“Fragmented how?”
He sat slowly in one of the chairs near the long table, still holding the page.
“My father was conscious when I arrived. Barely. He kept asking for a file.”
“A file?”
Nathan nodded. “I thought he meant legal documents. His will. Company papers. Something about Northstar. But he was agitated. He said, ‘Not the company. The girl.’”
My breath caught.
“The girl?”
“That’s what I remember. I thought he was confused. The doctors said medication could cause disorientation.”
I sat across from him, my bag sliding from my shoulder onto the floor.
“What girl?”
Nathan’s gaze lifted to mine.
“I don’t know.”
The answer settled between us, heavy and unsatisfying.
“What else did he say?”
Nathan looked down at the log again. “He said, ‘Find Bennett before they bury it.’”
The room seemed to tilt.
I gripped the edge of the table. “Bennett?”
“At the time, I thought it was a company. A law firm. Maybe a person from some deal he had never told me about.” His voice roughened. “Maya, I didn’t know you existed.”
I wanted to believe him.
I did believe him.
That was what made the fear worse.
Because if Nathan had not put my name on that log, and I had not been there, then someone else had reached back into a night of grief and placed me inside it.
“Why didn’t you tell me this when the first note came?” I asked.
“Because I didn’t connect it to you.”
“You heard my last name.”
“Yes. But Bennett isn’t rare. And after he died, everything moved fast. The board. The press. The investors. Celeste’s family.” He rubbed a hand over his face, suddenly looking exhausted. “I filed it away as one of his final confused sentences. I told myself grief makes meaning out of fragments.”
“And now?”
He looked at me. “Now I think my father was trying to tell me something.”
A soft sound escaped me. Not a laugh. Not a sob. Something caught between disbelief and dread.
The library door opened.
Both of us turned.
Priya Shah stood in the doorway, laptop tucked under one arm, expression sharp with concern.
“I got an alert from building security,” she said. “The tenth-floor library opened after hours.” Her gaze flicked from Nathan to me, then to the paper in his hand. “Please tell me this is about the altered forecast files and not something worse.”
Nathan and I exchanged a look.
Priya stepped inside and closed the door.
“Of course it’s something worse,” she said.
Ten minutes later, Denise arrived too.
Nathan had called her personally. I expected her to be annoyed at being pulled into an after-hours crisis on a Friday night, but Denise entered with a wool coat over her shoulders and a calmness that steadied the room.
She did not ask why Nathan and I were there together.
She did not look at me with suspicion.
