Elias came to her in early June and said: "Now."
She brought the journal that afternoon. She set it and the transcription on the desk, sat down across from him, and told him the whole story from finding it to reading it to copying the key details and waiting—the hiding places, the names, the nature of the evidence, and what Catherine had written on the last page.
He picked up the journal with both hands.
She watched him read. She had been watching him for long enough now to know the different qualities of his reading—the quick assessing scan, the focused detailed work, the kind where he pressed his thumb lightly to the edge of the page, which meant something in the text had reached him somewhere past the professional.
He pressed his thumb to the edge of a page.
"She was alone," he said, at last.
"Yes."
"She did all of this alone." It wasn't quite a question. He was speaking to the journal as much as to her.
"From what I could reconstruct, yes. No one who knew what she was doing. No one to hand it to." She paused. "She knew she wasn't going to be able to use it herself, so she hid it and hoped."
He was quiet for a long time. She didn't rush it.
"She should be remembered," he said, finally. "Not as a housekeeper. As the person who did this."
"She will be," Ella said. "When the case concludes, her materials will be part of the official record. Her name will be in it."
He closed the journal. Kept his hand on the cover—that gesture again, the one she had catalogued: not protecting it, but acknowledging it. Acknowledging its weight.
"You found it and you waited two months," he said. "Because Elias told you to wait."
"He told me your stability was improving and this would be a shock," she said. "He was right."
"You disagreed with the delay."
"I understood the delay," she corrected. "Evidence deployed at the wrong moment is evidence wasted. I wanted it used properly."
He looked at her for a long moment with the expression—she had come to know it well—of a man integrating a fact that keeps arriving from a direction he didn't predict. "You keep making decisions that put my interests ahead of your own," he said. "Not in a self-sacrificing way. In a—calculated way. As though you looked at all the options and concluded that my interests and yours were the same."
"In this matter," she said, "they are."
He said nothing for a moment. Then he opened the journal to the first page again. "Read with me," he said. "Stay. I want to go through this properly."
She moved her chair slightly closer. Opened her notebook. He began at the beginning.
They read together in the June afternoon, and she thought about two women in the same house, doing the same work, seventy years apart—one of them alone, one of them not, and what that difference meant.
She thought it meant everything.