The search warrant bore Judge Morrison's signature, the ink still tacky when Maren Calloway folded it into her leather portfolio. She stood on the sidewalk across from the Meridian Group's glass tower, a forty-six-story monument to money and obfuscation that caught the late-morning sun and threw it back in sharp fragments. The building's facade rippled with reflections of clouds, the neighboring rooftops, a jet trail bisecting the sky. Inside, somewhere on the forty-second floor, Darius Vance's private office waited, and Maren intended to open every drawer, every filing cabinet, every locked credenza until she found what her client could not remember.
Behind her, Yusuf Osei sat in the idling sedan, a manila envelope thick with building schematics spread across the passenger seat. He had circled the service entrance, the freight elevator, the executive parking garage. Three ingress points. Three ways in. He had also drawn a small clock face in the margin, a habit from his years as a public defender, a reminder that warrants expired and judges grew impatient with delays.
You ready? he asked, his voice warm even through the phone pressed to her ear.
Maren watched a pair of lobbyists in tailored coats sweep through the revolving door, their laughter carrying across the traffic noise. Nearly, she said. The DA's office is running interference. Mira Sandoval called me twenty minutes ago to remind me, very civilly, that this warrant represents an unnecessary provocation.
Yusuf made a low sound, half amusement, half concern. Mira has a gift for civility with a blade underneath.
That she does. Maren turned from the window-glass, her reflection ghosting over the distant skyline. Listen. There's something else. Nell Iverson came by my office this morning. She said Vance kept a private calendar at home, separate from the office system. Handwritten entries. If that calendar exists and we can find it, we won't need to rely on whatever scraps Vance left in his desk.
Let's not borrow tomorrow's trouble, Yusuf replied. Today's priority is the office. The calendar is a separate operation. We have seven hours before this warrant becomes invalid. I'll be at the freight entrance.
Maren pocketed the phone and crossed the street, the traffic parting around her with the usual indifference of Manhattan drivers. The lobby of the Meridian tower was a cathedral of pale stone and indirect lighting, its ceiling lost in a soft glow meant to suggest infinity. A security desk occupied the center of the floor, manned by two guards in blazers that strained across their shoulders. One of them, a man with a shaved head and a wire earpiece curling against his jaw, looked up as she approached.
Maren Calloway, defense counsel, she said, placing her bar credentials on the counter. I have a duly executed warrant to search the offices of Darius Vance on the forty-second floor. Here is my identification and the judge's order.
The guard studied the warrant with the careful attention of a man who had been briefed. He read the case number, the scope of the search, the limitations. He turned to his partner, exchanged a few words too low for Maren to catch, then reached for a telephone.
Ma'am, I'm going to need to call upstairs, he said. Building security will want to verify.
You do that, Maren replied. I'll wait.
She did not sit. She remained standing, portfolio in hand, her posture conveying neither aggression nor submission. Around her, the lobby continued its quiet commerce. A woman in a red coat hurried toward the elevators clutching a garment bag. A maintenance worker pushed a polishing machine across the marble in slow, hypnotic arcs. Somewhere above, a chime sounded, soft as a music box, marking the quarter hour.
The guard finished his call and set the receiver down with exaggerated care. Someone will meet you at the elevator bank, he said. Forty-second floor.
Thank you, Maren replied.
She crossed the lobby to the elevators, where a young man in a charcoal suit waited with a keycard and a smile that did not reach his eyes. He introduced himself as Kyle, from building management, and escorted her into a car lined with brushed steel. The doors closed, and the car rose with a faint mechanical sigh, the lobby shrinking beneath them until it was a dollhouse arrangement of stone and light.
Kyle did not speak during the ascent. Maren did not press him. She used the silence to review what she knew about the forty-second floor. Vance's office occupied the northwest corner, according to the schematics Yusuf had obtained from the city's building records. Three rooms in a row: a reception area, a private office, and an inner sanctum with a private bathroom and a closet. The inner sanctum, according to the floor plans, had only one door. Yusuf had circled it twice in red.
The elevator opened onto a corridor of pale carpet and recessed lighting, the air carrying the faint bite of recycled ventilation. A woman in a gray blazer waited with a tablet, her expression professionally neutral. She introduced herself as Helena, from the executive office, and asked to see the warrant again. Maren produced it. Helena read, nodded, and led the way down the corridor.
The reception area of Vance's office had already been cleared of staff. Two chairs sat at angles to a desk that held nothing but a glass paperweight and a single wilted orchid in a brass pot. Helena unlocked the inner door and stepped aside, allowing Maren to enter alone.
The private office smelled of leather and cold coffee. A mahogany desk dominated the center, its surface bare except for a leather blotter, a brass lamp with a green glass shade, and a framed photograph of Darius Vance shaking hands with a man Maren recognized as the governor. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with legal treatises and management books whose spines had never been cracked. A window behind the desk offered a view of the Hudson, the water flat and gray, a container ship crawling south.
Maren set her portfolio on the desk and began with the drawers. The top left held pens, a stapler, a box of paper clips. The top right held stationery, embossed with Vance's name, the ink still in its wrapper. The deep drawers on the right side were locked. She produced a small leather case from her bag and selected a tension wrench and a pick, tools she had learned to use years ago during a pro bono innocence project. The first lock yielded in under a minute. The second took longer.
Inside the second drawer, beneath a layer of financial statements, she found a metal box the size of a cigar humidor. Its lid was cold, its surface free of dust. She lifted it onto the desk, worked the simple latch, and raised the cover.
Papers. A thick sheaf, held together with a black binder clip. Maren carried them to the window for better light and began to sort. Most were invoices, receipts, wire transfer confirmations. She set those aside. Near the bottom of the stack, she found a single sheet that had been partially burned. The flames had consumed the upper right corner, leaving a ragged edge and a pattern of ash. But the rest of the page remained legible, the words sharp enough to read.
It was a memo, dated October 12, 2018. The salutation read: Darius. The signature was too charred to make out. And the subject line, underlined twice in red ink, said: Project Watershed.
Maren read the surviving text with care, her eyes moving slowly, her pen hovering over the relevant lines.
As discussed, the acquisition of the 1400 block of Aldridge Avenue will require coordination with the city planning office. Trent has confirmed that the variance request can be expedited through the commission's review process, provided the necessary filings are submitted by month end. The rezoning will unlock the parcel for mixed-use development, and our equity partners are prepared to fund the transition pending council approval. Please confirm the closing date at your earliest convenience.
The memo was a roadmap. It described, in the dry language of a business transaction, the steps by which a city block had been acquired, rezoned, and prepared for development. It named a city official. It referenced a closing date. And it was signed by someone whose name the fire had erased.
Maren photographed each page with her phone, then the partial memo, then the metal box and its contents in situ. She worked quickly, her movements precise, aware that the warrant's clock was running. She moved to the bookshelves, pulling volumes at random, checking for hollowed-out interiors and false backs. She checked the closet, the bathroom, the panels behind the radiator. She found nothing else of immediate interest.
Helena appeared in the doorway. Is there anything you need, counselor?
A copy of the office key inventory, Maren replied. And the maintenance logs for this floor for the past month.
Helena's expression flickered, just for a moment, a tightening around the eyes. I'll see what I can find, she said.
Maren folded the partial memo into her portfolio, along with the financial papers and the photographs. She would need to verify the signatures, cross-reference the wire transfers, and confirm the identity of the equity partners. But the memo itself was enough. It was a thread, and if she pulled it carefully, it would unravel the rest.
She thought of Mira Sandoval, somewhere in the DA's office, already calculating the political cost of this search. She thought of Trent Hadley, whose name appeared in a 2018 memo about a city block in a development deal, a man who sat on the planning commission that had approved the very variance the memo described. She thought of her client, sitting in a holding cell on Rikers Island, unable to remember the night that had put him there.
The office was quiet. The container ship had moved beyond the window, leaving only the gray water and the distant shore. Maren gathered her things and walked back to the elevator, where Kyle waited with his keycard and his guarded smile. The doors closed. The car began to descend. And in her portfolio, pressed between the pages of a legal pad, the half-burned memo waited to be read again, and again, until its secrets gave way.
The elevator deposited Maren on the forty-second floor with a soft chime, and the doors parted onto a corridor lined in dark walnut and brushed steel. The receptionist here was younger than Helena, sharper in the way she assessed Maren before deciding how much cooperation to offer. She made a call, then gestured down the hall.
Mira Sandoval's office occupied the corner, and it announced its inhabitant before Maren crossed the threshold. The shelves held treatises on white-collar criminal procedure, bound volumes of the Law Review, and a single framed photograph of a younger Mira standing beside a judge whose name Maren recognized from campaign posters. The desk was clear except for a laptop, a glass of water with a slice of lemon, and a single yellow legal pad.
Mira rose when Maren entered, and the two women regarded each other across the expanse of gray carpet.
"Maren." Mira's voice carried the faint warmth of someone who had once meant it, preserved like a fossil. "Sit. Please."
Maren sat in one of the leather chairs opposite the desk. She set her portfolio on her lap, unopened. She had learned, years ago, that Mira read body language the way other people read contracts, and that opening a briefcase too quickly was the same as admitting you had come to beg.
"Coffee?" Mira asked.
"Water is fine."
Mira poured from a glass pitcher, slid the glass across the desk, and resumed her seat. She did not drink from her own glass. She folded her hands on the yellow pad and waited.
"Vance," Mira said finally. "You took the case."
"I took the case."
"Three days before the preliminary hearing. With no staff, no investigator, and a client who cannot remember his own name on the night in question."
"Two days, now."
Mira's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "You always did love a bad hand."
"You taught me that the worst hands teach you the most."
"I taught you a great many things, Maren. Including, I hope, when to fold."
The silence between them had the particular weight of two people who had once been close and were now negotiating the terms of their distance. Maren could feel Mira assessing her, calculating the angle of approach, the pressure to apply. It was the same calculation Mira had applied in every negotiation Maren had watched her conduct, from plea deals to press conferences. Mira believed that every conversation was a transaction, and that the highest art was to make the other person believe they had won something of value.
Maren broke first, because breaking first was sometimes the only way to change the terms.
"I need Vance's visitor logs," she said. "For the night he died, and the thirty days before."
Mira's expression did not change. "The visitor logs are in the DA's file. You can request them through discovery."
"I am requesting them through you."
"That is not how discovery works."
"It is how courtesy works."
Mira regarded her for a long moment. Then she opened a desk drawer, withdrew a manila folder, and slid it across the desk. "I had a feeling you would ask. I pulled them this morning."
Maren opened the folder. The logs were printed in a small, utilitarian font, each entry timestamped and initialed by the receptionist on duty. She scanned the entries for the night of Darius Vance's death. The first entries were routine: deliveries, a cleaning crew, a partner who had returned for a forgotten briefcase. Then, at 9:00 PM, an entry that made Maren stop.
Trent Hadley. Visitor. Purpose: personal.
She read it again. 9:00 PM. The firm operated until seven. The cleaning crew had signed out at eight-thirty. Hadley had arrived alone, after hours, and the receptionist on duty had logged him as a personal visitor rather than a professional one.
"Who logged this?" Maren asked.
"Karen Pham. She works the late shift on Tuesdays and Thursdays."
"Has Karen been interviewed?"
"She was interviewed on Friday. She says Mr. Hadley arrived at nine, showed his keycard, and went directly to Mr. Vance's office. She did not see him leave. She assumes he left after she went off shift at ten."
"You assume."
"The building has security cameras. We are reviewing the footage."
Maren turned the page. The next entry was at 10:47 PM. Building security. Reason: welfare check. The notation read: Subject found unresponsive in office. 911 dispatched. Body removed by medical examiner at 12:15 AM.
Between Hadley's 9:00 PM arrival and the welfare check, there was an hour and forty-seven minutes during which no one had logged an exit for Hadley and no one had entered the office.
"I would like a copy of the camera footage," Maren said.
"You can request it through discovery."
"Mira."
Mira's jaw tightened. She did not like being pushed, and she liked even less being pushed by someone she had once mentored. But she also understood, as Maren did, that the footage was either exculpatory or it was not, and that suppressing it would create a record that would haunt the case for years.
"I will have my office provide the footage from the forty-second floor and the lobby," Mira said. "But I want you to understand something, Maren."
"Tell me."
"If you find something in that footage that helps your client, I will not oppose its introduction. If you find something that hurts him, I will use it."
"That is not how the rules of evidence work."
"That is exactly how the rules of evidence work when the prosecutor is also running for judge." Mira's voice was flat, the warmth of moments ago evaporated. "I have a perfect record, Maren. I intend to keep it. If your client is guilty, he will be convicted. If he is innocent, the evidence will show it, and I will not stand in the way."
"You said that once before."
"I said it to you, about a client named DeShawn Rollins, and I meant it then too. The evidence showed what the evidence showed."
Maren did not answer. She had thought, for a long time, that she had made peace with the Rollins case. She had not. She had simply learned to live with the weight of it, the way one learns to live with a chronic injury, by not asking it to do more than it could.
"The visitor logs," Mira continued, "also show that Mr. Hadley visited Mr. Vance's office four other times in the month preceding his death. Twice during business hours. Twice after."
"After hours?"
"Once at 8:30 PM, once at 9:15 PM. Both logged as personal visits."
"Did you know about these visits before today?"
Mira paused. The pause was fractional, but Maren caught it. "I became aware of them during the initial review of the firm's records."
"And you did not include them in the discovery package you provided to my predecessor."
"Your predecessor did not request visitor logs."
"Because she did not know to ask."
"That is not my responsibility."
"It is exactly your responsibility, Mira. Brady. Giglio. You taught me the names."
Mira's composure cracked, just slightly, a fissure in the marble. "Mr. Hadley is a member of the city planning commission. He is a donor to several campaigns, including, I suspect, the campaign of whoever eventually replaces Judge Hargrove. His presence in this case is a complication I am managing."
"You are managing it by sitting on evidence."
"I am managing it by ensuring that the evidence is reviewed in a manner consistent with the rules of professional conduct." Mira's voice had gone cold. "I will not be lectured by you, Maren. Not about Brady. Not about ethics. Not about anything."
Maren held her gaze. She thought, for a moment, of pushing harder, of demanding an explanation for the timing of Hadley's visits, of asking why the logs had not been volunteered. But she had learned, from Mira herself, that the art of negotiation was knowing when to accept the concessions on the table and when to walk away and fight another day.
She closed the folder. "I want the camera footage by end of business tomorrow."
"You will have it by six PM."
"And I want a list of every employee who had access to the forty-second floor on the night of Mr. Vance's death."
"You will have it by noon."
Maren rose. She extended her hand. Mira took it, and the handshake was firm, brief, and entirely professional.
"For what it is worth," Mira said, as Maren turned toward the door, "I hope you find what you are looking for."
Maren paused. "What am I looking for, Mira?"
"The truth. Whatever that turns out to be."
Maren left the office without answering. She did not trust herself to speak, because the answer she wanted to give was not the answer a defense attorney could afford to give. She wanted to say that she was looking for the thing that would let her sleep at night, the thing that would balance the scales she had been carrying since Rollins, the thing that would prove that the system she had spent her career navigating was capable, occasionally, of producing a result she could live with.
She did not say any of this. She walked back to the elevator, pressed the button for the lobby, and waited.
The doors opened on the lobby, and she stepped out into the marble quiet. Through the glass, she could see the gray water and the distant shore, and somewhere on Rikers Island, her client was waiting for her to make sense of a night he could not remember, a night that had ended with a man dead on the floor of his office and no memory of how he had gotten there.
She thought of Trent Hadley, arriving at nine PM, after hours, alone, logging his visit as personal rather than professional. She thought of the camera footage, waiting to be reviewed, waiting to show her what had happened in the hour and forty-seven minutes between Hadley's arrival and the welfare check. She thought of Mira's face, when Maren had asked about the visitor logs, the fractional pause, the crack in the composure.
Something was wrong with this case. Something was being managed. And Maren intended to find out what it was, even if the finding cost her the only ally she had left in the DA's office.
The elevator depositd Maren on the forty-second floor into a corridor that smelled of lemon polish and recycled air, the particular sterility of a building that wanted to feel expensive without committing to the cost of open windows. She had taken the stairs from the thirty-ninth as a matter of habit, one of the small disciplines she had maintained since her first year practicing, when a senior partner had told her that elevators were for people who had time to waste, and she had believed him, mostly because he had been right about most things, including the ones that had eventually driven her out of his firm and into a quieter office of her own on the twelfth floor of a building that did not have a forty-second story to visit.
The stairwell door closed behind her with a soft click, and for a moment she stood still, listening to the building breathe around her. Somewhere below, a vacuum cleaner droned. Somewhere above, a phone rang twice and stopped. And then, cutting through the hum of climate control, a tone she had not heard in this building before, a rising two-note alarm that meant, according to the laminated card on the back of her old access badge, a localized security event requiring staff awareness but not evacuation.
She moved toward the sound, her heels quick on the carpet, her bag pressed against her hip. The corridor curved past a bank of executive offices, all dark except for one at the end where a sliver of light showed under the door. The alarm was coming from the stairwell two doors down, the one she had just exited, and as she approached she could hear voices, low and businesslike, and the shuffle of feet that did not want to be hurried but were being hurried anyway.
She stopped at the corner and looked.
Two men in dark suits, one tall and pale with a buzz cut, one shorter and broader with the soft hands of someone who had never manually opened a door that did not have an automatic operator, were shepherding a group of four people toward the service elevator at the end of the hall. The four were dressed in the muted gray of the building's contracted cleaning crew, their uniforms slightly too large, their movements carrying the particular fatigue of people who worked the hours when the rest of the world was deciding what to have for breakfast. Each of them carried a caddy of supplies, mops and spray bottles and the small vacuum units that hummed in the offices long after the lawyers had gone home.
At the front of the group, walking with a straightness that suggested he was concentrating on it, was a man she recognized. His name was Yusuf Osei, and she had not seen him in almost three years, not since he had testified as a character witness in a case she had handled for a friend, a slip-and-fall that had become something more complicated when the plaintiff turned out to have a history of fraudulent claims that Yusuf, working then as a private investigator, had uncovered in less than a week. He had been thorough, and kind, and he had bought her coffee afterward and told her that the system was not broken, just tired, and that people like them were the ones who had to keep showing up for it anyway.
He was older now, the gray at his temples broader, the lines around his eyes deeper, but the way he held himself was the same, the patience of a man who had learned to move through institutional spaces without disturbing their air.
He saw her at almost the same moment she saw him.
His eyes met hers, and she watched his expression move through recognition, caution, and then a stillness that she could only describe as decision. He did not speak. The two men in suits were too close, their attention on the group, their body language communicating a desire to be elsewhere and a willingness to be unpleasant to get there. But Yusuf Osei, with the calm of a man who had spent a career watching courtrooms and understanding what was visible and what was not, shaped his mouth around three words, exaggerating each one just enough to be read at a distance and not so much that the men beside him would notice.
Check. The. Cameras.
Then one of the suits put a hand on his shoulder, not roughly, but with the proprietary casualness of someone who had been told to move a body and intended to do it, and Yusuf went where he was guided, through the service doors and into the waiting elevator, and the doors closed on his face, which was still, and his eyes, which were not.
The alarm cut off. The corridor settled into its previous hum. Maren stood at the corner for a long moment, her bag against her hip, the word cameras sitting in the center of her chest like a stone.
She pulled out her phone and opened the thread she had started with Nell Iverson, the assistant who had copied her on the floor directory, and typed two words: "Forty-two." Then, after a pause, she added a question mark.
The reply came in eleven seconds. It read: "CCTV rack is on 41, mechanical room B, code 4-7-2-9. Building security runs it but legal has read access via the tenant portal. You need a current matter number to pull. I just put yours in. Should work. Be quick."
Maren read it twice. She did not ask Nell how she had known to send the code, or how she had known that Maren would need it, or how she had procured a matter number that belonged to a different attorney in a different case on a floor she had not been cleared to enter. There were questions, and there were gifts, and she had learned early in her career that the two were not always distinguishable in the moment of receipt.
She went back to the stairwell, descended one flight, and found mechanical room B without difficulty, a heavy door marked with the building's logo and a small placard that read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY, which she opened with a code that she had not earned and did not intend to explain.
The room was cool and loud with the white noise of climate systems, racks of servers humming along the far wall, indicator lights blinking in patterns she did not try to interpret. A monitor on the standing desk showed a grid of camera feeds, each one a small rectangle of black and gray, the building at night, empty and watchful.
She sat down, pulled the keyboard toward her, and entered the matter number Nell had provided. The system accepted it without complaint, a small professional courtesy that she suspected had been arranged by someone who owed Nell a favor or feared her enough to grant one preemptively, and a menu opened, listing the cameras on the forty-second floor, the forty-first, and the lobby, with timestamps and a small set of icons she recognized from her years of practice as standard legal-discovery playback controls.
She found the feed for the corridor outside Suite 4211, the one she had just walked through, and scrubbed back to the time stamp she needed, 8:47 PM, the moment Trent Hadley had logged his entry to the building. The image was sharp enough, better than she had expected, the angle showing the full length of the corridor and the entrance to the suite.
She pressed play.
At 8:47, the elevator opened and Hadley stepped out, alone, in a suit that probably cost more than her monthly rent, his hair exactly the kind of careless that required ten minutes of effort. He looked at his phone, smiled at something, and walked to the suite. He did not knock. He used a key.
The next twelve minutes showed nothing. The corridor was empty. The office behind the glass wall was visible from this angle, and she could see the desk lamp, the filing cabinet, the edge of the window, but not the doorway into the back rooms.
At 8:59, a second figure appeared in the frame, emerging from the service corridor at the far end, not the main elevator. The figure was slight, dressed in dark clothing, moving with a quickness that suggested familiarity with the route. Maren leaned forward.
The figure reached the door to Suite 4211, produced a card, and let themselves in. The angle did not show their face. It showed only that they moved like someone who had done this before, and that the card they used was not Hadley's.
The feed continued. At 9:14, Hadley emerged, alone, his expression different now, flatter, and he walked to the elevator without looking back. The corridor held its breath. At 9:17, the figure in dark clothing came out, paused, and looked directly at the camera, and for a long moment the screen held a face that Maren had seen in press releases and donor lists and one very specific photograph on the desk of her former mentor.
It was not Trent Hadley.
It was not Darius Vance.
It was a woman in her forties, dark hair cut short, with a face that suggested intelligence and a kind of controlled ferocity, and Maren did not know her name, but she knew what she had just seen, which was someone who had been in that office between the time her client could not account for and the time the body was found, and who had then left by a route that suggested they did not want to be counted among the visitors.
She saved the clip, exported it to a secure folder with a filename that meant nothing to anyone but her, and sat back in the chair.
The monitor hummed. The servers blinked. Somewhere on the floor above her, Yusuf Osei was being held in a service elevator or a security office or a car he had not asked to be in, and he had known, when he saw her, that this was the thing she needed. He had known because he was the kind of man who watched systems and understood what they were designed to conceal, and he had been willing to risk whatever consequence came from telling her, and she intended to make sure that the telling was not wasted.
She pulled out her phone and typed a message to Nell: "I have it. Thank you. One more question. Who runs security for Vance-Lin on nights and weekends?"
The reply came faster this time, as though Nell had been waiting. "In-house team, four rotating. Day lead is Linda Park. Night lead is someone named Reece Cotter, off books. If you need to talk to him, don't go through the front desk. He uses the freight entrance on 42nd."
Maren read the name twice. Reece Cotter. The man who had taken her statement in the lobby. The man who had looked at her when she said her client's name and whose hand had moved, just slightly, toward his radio, a motion that she had filed away at the time as nervousness and that she now understood had been the beginning of a decision about what to do with her.
She closed the laptop, left the mechanical room, and walked back up the stairs to the forty-second floor, where the corridor was quiet and the cleaning crew was gone and the suite at the end of the hall showed a thin line of light under its door, the same line she had seen on her first pass, which meant that someone was in there now, in the office where a man had died twelve hours earlier, in a building that wanted to be expensive, on a night that someone was working very hard to make disappear.
She did not knock. She did not enter. She stood at the edge of the light and took out her phone, and she composed a message to Mira Sandoval that contained only the time stamp and the filename, and she pressed send, and she watched the little bar fill, and she waited for the reply that would tell her whether her former mentor was part of the management or part of the thing being managed, and whether the alliance she had offered in the lobby had any chance of surviving the morning.
The phone buzzed.
The reply was a single word: "Where."
Maren typed back: "My office. One hour. Come alone."
Then she turned and walked to the elevator, and as the doors closed on the forty-second floor she allowed herself, for the first time since she had walked into this building, to feel the particular clarity of a case that had just become a case again, and not a performance, and not a trap, but a set of facts that someone was afraid of, and a client who was sitting in a cell waiting for her to find them, and a building full of people who were about to learn that Maren Calloway did not forget what she saw, and did not forgive what was done in the dark.