“Yes.”
“Why?”
Stephen rubbed his forehead.
“Because of what happened after I found it.”
“What happened?”
“Someone from Harlow’s legal department came to my office the next morning and asked whether I’d copied anything.”
A chill crawled over my arms.
“What did you say?”
“I told them no.”
“Had you?”
Stephen looked at me.
“Yes.”
For the first time since he’d walked through my door, I saw the man I knew again—not calm exactly, but thoughtful. Careful.
“I thought something was strange about the file,” he continued. “There were no catalog numbers. No archive tags. It was inside a box labeled with unrelated accounting records. I scanned part of it because I thought it had been misplaced.”
“And you kept the scans?”
“For a while.”
“For a while?”
“My laptop was stolen six months later.”
I frowned.
“Was anything else stolen?”
“No.”
That silenced me.
Stephen gave a humorless little laugh.
