Flawless Ruin

“Is there anything I can do to—”

“No.”

He turns and retreats to his office, closing the door.

And that’s all the answer I get.

For the restof the morning, I watch a steady stream of people file in and out of his office, meeting after meeting with different departments and lawyers. But the space between us is so wide, it’s killing me.

I can’t deal with this, so I decide to take a break from the torture, and go hide away down in the archives. I’m supposed to be digitizing old design notes, and it’s just the kind of monotonous work that’s a relief today: stacks of old lookbooks, press clippings, and more, waiting to be scanned into the new filing system.

I’m about three-quarters of the way through the pile, which is right where I left it before my trip to Rome, so I settle in for the long-haul again, trying to block thoughts of Caleb from my mind.

But the very next file I pick up, I find myself looking at a picture of a maybe thirteen-year-old Caleb, standing next to his father at the grand opening of the Chicago store. He’s handsome, strikingly similar to his father.

Geez, Caleb, were you ever an awkward, gawky teenager?

I flip to the next file, but there’s a beautiful woman, holding a little boy in her arms as they look into a display case full of glittering jewels. The caption says, The next generation of Sterling Cross is hard at work! Young Caleb Sterling, son of Annette and Jacob Sterling, learns the ropes from his mother.

Caleb.

There’s really no escaping him, at least, not in this building.

I find myself paging back through book after book, gazing at the photos of Caleb and his family, as if they will reveal some secret to me that will bring him closer.

But the only secret that’s revealed to me is just how far he’s willing to go to protect Sterling Cross. I’d understood before that he cared, but I never quite knew what that meant until I saw how he behaved with Nero.

He’d rather die than lose this company.

I shiver at the thought. The stakes here are so far out of my league, I don’t know what to think.

I pile the books back up and try to get back to work, sorting them by year as I painstakingly scan the clippings and notes. I finish with one, and reach for the next year, 1987, but it’s missing. I check the shelves again, to see if I’ve overlooked it, but there’s no sign of the press clippings file.

Or any file from that year.

Weird.

“Bob?” I call across the room, to the old archivist.

The old man pops his head up and starts to shuffle toward me. “What can I do for you, dear?”

“I just noticed that we’re missing a bunch of files.” I show him the empty space in the library.

He peers through his bifocals and frowns. “Gee! That’s even before I got here. But they’ve got to be here somewhere. Let me just get the logs.”

He shuffles away and comes back a few moments later with a dusty logbook of old computer printouts. He opens it up and scans down the pages.

“Eighty-six, eighty-seven… Huh, that’s odd. There are plenty of records here in the system.”

“Somebody took them all?” I ask. “But why?”

“Beats me.” Bob yawns. “Well, I’m about to call it a day. You going to stay here?”

I nod. “Just a little longer.”

He heads out, leaving me alone. I go through the archives again, looking for any trace of the missing files, but the more I look without finding them, the more curious I get.

What’s so special about that year? And who would have taken any files from the Sterling Cross history?