She had been polite enough to answer him, but Evander regretted asking at once. Still, he endured her answer about the hurricane in stiff sympathy, thinking of how very close Caroline had come to losing her life in that storm – but not about to linger on the subject and drag them both into misery.

More misery, anyway. Mrs. Warbeck had saved the day, however, with a question he might have called impertinent at any other moment but was eminently grateful for now. Evander’s sheepish expression did not fade, but he did manage a slight, embarrassed laugh. “Oh,” he began, shaking his head at the thought of fake-him blundering about the Ministry and making a bad impression of himself – no offence to Mrs. Warbeck, but he was sure he had looked a real fool.

Well, more of a fool than usual, because – “You see, you always have to knock first,” he confessed, because the door had been, as long as he’d worked there, peculiarly petulant about politeness. “Everyone has to knock before it’ll open, myself included,” he explained, almost apologetically. (And yes, people had long gotten a real laugh about Darrow regularly knocking on his own office door, but by this point Evander privately found it soothing, some odd little obsessive-compulsive homecoming ritual.) “If you try to force it open with the handle or the key, it simply won’t budge.”

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