The company where her father had worked no longer existed.

  The building had been demolished three years prior, replaced by condominiums with balconies too small for furniture. Elena stood across the street from them one afternoon and tried to imagine rows of drafting tables behind the tinted glass. She could not.

  Finding his former colleagues required patience and an uncomfortable number of phone calls. Some did not remember him. Some remembered only a last name and a cubicle location.

  Three agreed to meet.

  Mrs. Chen chose a café near her retirement apartment. She arrived precisely on time, her gray hair clipped neatly at the nape of her neck.

  “He was quiet,” she said after Elena explained herself. “Always polite. Always early. Ate lunch at his desk.” She smiled faintly. “I assumed he was working very hard.”

  “Did you ever see what he was working on?”

  Mrs. Chen considered this. “Paper. Always paper. But not reports. Too careful for that.”

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  “Careful?”

  “He treated it like it mattered.”

  Elena thanked her and walked home with that sentence echoing in her mind.

  The second colleague, Mr. Hendricks, had been seated in the adjacent cubicle for eleven years.

  “I saw him drawing once,” he said, stirring his coffee long after the sugar had dissolved. “Not doodling. Not absentminded. He had rulers. Compasses. The real tools.”

  “What did he say it was?”

  Mr. Hendricks frowned. “I asked. He looked at me like I’d caught him stealing.” He hesitated. “Not angry. Just exposed. Said it was a private project. After that he was… careful.”

  “Careful how?”

  “Closed.”

  The third meeting was with Doris, who had supervised her father during the final decade of his employment. Her office was lined with binders labeled in tidy block letters.

  “He was competent,” Doris said. “Never ambitious. Never late with assignments. But he left at exactly six-thirty every evening.”

  Elena felt a small tightening in her chest.

  “He left something with me,” Doris added, opening a drawer. “Told me if anything happened to him, someone might come looking. I thought he meant police.”

  She slid the file folder across the desk.

  Inside was the photograph. Mira on the bridge.

  And the letter.

  Doris studied Elena carefully.

  “You should know,” she said, after a pause, “he seemed happiest when he was alone.”

  It was not an accusation.

  It was not even unkind.

  But it lodged somewhere difficult.

  Elena left the office and stood on the sidewalk, watching pedestrians move around her with practiced efficiency.

  Happiest when he was alone.

  She thought of the hallway outside his study. The soft click of the door. The scratch of pencil on paper.

  She had mistaken that sound for distance.

  Perhaps it had been something else.

  Or perhaps it had been exactly what it sounded like.

  That evening, she spread the maps out again across her apartment floor.

  If he had been happiest alone, then she would learn the shape of that solitude.

  She began with 1978.