Chapter 15: Operation Palimpsest — The Architect's True Design

The envelope had been sitting in the inside left pocket of Watson's overcoat for eleven days.

He had moved it twice — once to his desk drawer, once back to the coat — as though its proximity to his person were a question he kept answering differently. Mycroft had said: open it when you are ready to stop being solely reactive. Watson had spent eleven days determining what, precisely, that meant, and whether he had yet achieved it, and whether Mycroft's conditions were worth observing at all given that Mycroft had known about Corvath for fourteen months without volunteering the fact.

He had the answer to all three questions now. He had a name, written in his own hand in capitals on the open page of his notebook, and a woman's measured voice still settling in his memory like sediment, and the clear cold understanding that whatever Mycroft's envelope contained, he could no longer afford to approach it cautiously.