Was it really not there? Or had those numbers gone just as silent as the ones from the Lord?

She drew in a long, slow breath. At work she was fine. Her mind worked more or less as it always had. But at home . . . all she could do was notice how empty the flat felt. Her mother wasn’t there to chide her for thinking about nothing but work. Every time she went to the kitchenette, there seemed no point in cooking anything just for her.

Maman would have liked Holmes. And Drake. And this unconventional duchess and her father.

I could stand to be alone if I could still hear you, Lord. She directed the silent words upward. But even to her ears, they sounded more accusatory than inviting. Because she shouldn’t be alone. And yet, she ought to be capable of it. She could be. She would be.

Once out of Westminster and back in her own neighborhood, Margot instructed the driver to drop her at the park. As he puttered away again, she hurried over to see if the Go board was set up.

It was. She took a moment to study the play and identify Williams’s latest move, smiling at the slip of damp paper anchored to it this time, proving it had been waiting for hours. Yosu-miru. A probing move. She answered it with a move that took one of his stones but no doubt revealed to him a bit of her strategy. She’d been making each move with the eye toward sabaki—a flexible position that wouldn’t easily be attacked.

She looked around, half expecting to see Holmes there simply because she had the card to give to him. But no one lingered in the night, and as the first needles of a cold rain stung her face, she had to grant the wisdom of that. Opening the umbrella she’d long ago learned never to leave home without, she hurried to her building, gathered her post from the box, and jogged up the stairs.

Once inside, she tossed everything into its proper place and flipped through the three envelopes. One was a bill for funeral expenses—she’d check their numbers and then split it with Lukas. But the other two were odd. They were both in the same handwriting, to her, but with no return address. Heart thudding almost painfully, she noted that they each had a number in the place where the sender’s direction ought to have gone. 1 and 2.

She opened 1 first. Inside rested a small slip of paper, no bigger than one inch by three. Les Heures Claires was written upon it.