Charlotte nodded. She did not ask to take the originals. Instead, she photographed the protective cover and asked Evan to arrange an independent examination so nobody could later accuse either of them of quietly changing the evidence. When Lily wandered back into the kitchen in her pajamas, Charlotte put her telephone down and helped her find the missing wheel of a plastic rover.
"Can you fix this?" Lily asked Evan.
"I can try."
"You always say that."
"Because sometimes trying is the honest part."
Charlotte watched him gently work the wheel back onto the little axle. The same patience he had shown in the prototype garage appeared here in a kitchen furnished with secondhand chairs. She thought of Richard, who had been proud of results and contemptuous of the people who made them possible. A painful truth settled over her: she had learned from her father how to build a company without ever learning how to sit patiently beside somebody whose life depended on it.
After Lily went to bed, Evan returned to the table. "Why would my father tell me to show you the blueprints first?"
"Maybe he wanted me to remember what we built before I saw what was hidden. Or maybe there was something in the drawings that would prove the room was important."
"You said you knew about a locked room."
Charlotte described the old test facility and the basement engineering office Richard rarely allowed visitors to enter. She remembered a steel door, a wall painted cream, and a narrow window through which she could see drafting tables. After Daniel's dismissal, Richard ordered that section sealed, calling it obsolete. No formal inventory had ever been provided to her.
Evan looked at the key. "Then tomorrow we go there."
"We should bring an independent observer."
"We can. But I open the door. My father left the key to me."
Charlotte accepted the condition. She rose to leave, then stopped beside the photograph of Daniel on the hallway shelf. For an instant her face carried the uncertain grief of somebody looking at a dead person who had once offered her a kindness she had not deserved. Evan saw it, and for the first time he understood that the old scandal might have wounded Charlotte in ways she was only now admitting.
"You really thought he stole those designs?" he asked.
She looked at him. "Yes. And when the doubts came, I buried them because accepting them meant questioning my father."
"That's not an answer I'm going to thank you for."
"I wouldn't expect you to."
She left quietly. Evan locked the door, gathered the papers, and checked on Lily before returning to the kitchen. He held the key against his palm until the metal grew warm. His father had died with a damaged reputation, and Evan had carried that damage into every interview, every apartment application, and every school form where he filled in the space for family history. Tomorrow he might learn why. He was not certain whether that possibility felt like hope or a new kind of danger.