I hadn’t realized he was carrying around this old photo. The discovery might have charmed me or made my eyes well up. But it didn’t. It only made me jealous of that other girl—the one who didn’t exist anymore, the only one he’d ever loved.

I took the photo out and tossed the wallet on the floor. On my way out the door I picked up the garbage bag and dropped it in a dumpster two blocks away. I threw the photo in after it.

ONE MONTH IN, my routine was well established at CDMI. Every morning I went to my own little office first, checked my voicemail and email for anything from Barrett or any company-wide blasts—those were the only two possibilities—got a cup of coffee, then took the stairs down to the document room.

In my mind I called it The Lab—it was that sterile and that secret. According to Lester Willard, the paralegal-cum–security guard, the room was to remain locked at all times. Only the two of us were permitted entry, and he had the only key. None of the documents were to be removed from the room. A copier stood in one corner of the vast white space, and all photocopying was to be done on that machine and that machine only. The same machine would be used for Bates-stamping to place identifying numbers on the documents that eventually would be produced to Mark Ivins.

On one of the tables was a computer for my use in indexing the documents. It was a standalone unit without Wi-Fi and not connected to the company LAN. The only other furniture in the room was a single chair on wheels for me to roll from table to table as I did my document review, and a stationary chair for Lester that he kept by the door.

All the documents in the room, all those stacks of pure white paper, were photocopies. The first day I asked Lester where the originals were, and he replied, “I wouldn’t know, ma’am,” which soon became his default response to every question I asked. He worked the copier whenever I gave him a stack of documents, but otherwise he spent the day in his chair, reading the paper and mostly watching me. He was my paralegal-cum-babysitter.

Some of the documents I’d seen before. They were copies of the original papers I’d found in the file boxes in my office the first day on the job. None of these elaborate security measures were in place then, probably because the boxes arrived without warning after Barrett was unexpectedly called to KL. It was pure accident that I’d stumbled upon them, and now I was glad I’d taken such care in resealing the boxes. It was obvious that Barrett considered them to be highly sensitive.

My marching orders from Barrett were to identify any privileged or confidential documents among these towering piles of papers. The privileged documents were easy to spot, since they almost always involved communications to or from a lawyer. As soon as I developed a roster of pertinent lawyers’ names, I was able to breeze through that part of the job. Identifying confidential employee information was a little harder, with thousands of people in the company’s employ, but once I came upon the payroll records, I was able to create a database of employee names.