Room, apparently, for a woman with auburn hair to walk through his hallways and notice everything he’d stopped seeing years ago.
“Your books are out of order.”
Lincoln paused in the doorway of the living room. Morgan had hesitated in front of the built-in shelves, her head tilted at an angle that suggested deep concentration.
“They’re alphabetized by author.”
“Yes, but within the author groupings, they’re not chronological by publication date.” She reached out, almost touched a spine, then pulled her hand back. “This Asimov collection hasFoundation and EmpirebeforeFoundation. And your Heinlein?—”
“You organize by publication date?”
“It’s the only honest organization. The order things entered the world matters.” She caught herself, and Lincoln watched the shift happen—the sudden awareness that she’d revealed too much, the instinctive retreat. “Sorry. I know it’s not—most people don’t care about that kind of thing.”
“I care.”
She looked at him, uncertain.
“I just never thought about it that way,” Lincoln continued. “Alphabetical seemed efficient. But your system has internal logic. Chronology preserves the evolution of an author’s thinking.”
Morgan’s shoulders loosened slightly. “Ms. Delacroix—she was my mentor—she used to say you could trace a writer’s whole life through the order of their books. What they feared, what they hoped for, how they changed.”
He nodded. “That’s logical.”
“May I—” She gestured toward the shelves. “Just the Asimov.”
“Of course. Feel free to reorganize in whatever way seems best.”
She moved before he’d finished speaking, her hands finding spines and pulling them free with a particular kind of reverence. Lincoln watched her work—watched herfingers sort and arrange, watched her lips move silently as she processed publication dates from memory.
That was when it hit him. Really hit him.
She wasn’t looking anything up. Wasn’t checking copyright pages or pulling out her phone. She justknew. Every publication date, every book in the sequence, pulled from perfect memory like data from a server.
Lincoln had spent fifteen years building systems to do what her brain did automatically. All those servers humming in his command center, all those redundant backup arrays and indexed databases, they were just his attempt to approximate what she’d been born with. He’d made a fortune creating tools for information storage and retrieval, and here she was, doing it better than any of his algorithms without even trying.
Knowing about her memory and watching it in action were two very different things.
When she finished reorganizing the Asimov section, she stepped back and surveyed her work with obvious satisfaction. Then she moved on to the next section.
All he could do was watch, fascinated.
Eventually, she froze, her face flushing, as she turned to him. “I just reorganized your entire bookshelf without asking.”
“I noticed.”
“That was—I shouldn’t have—” She pressed her palms flat against her thighs. “I do stuff like that. When I’m anxious. Make external order to manage internal chaos. I should have asked first.”
“Morgan.” He waited until she looked at him. “My command center is arranged in a very specific configuration. Every monitor, every cable, every peripheral in exactly the right position. When someone moves my mouse three inches to the left, it bothers me for the rest of the day.”
She laughed—a small, surprised sound. “Three inches?”
“Two point seven, technically. But I round up.”
“Of course you do.”
The ease of it caught him off guard. No judgment, no confusion—just acceptance. When was the last time someone had simply accepted the way his brain worked?
“Do you want to see where I actually do the work?” The words burst from him before he realized he wanted to say them. “The command center.”
