The Colm Connection Afternoon light came through the reading room windows at Edgewick Branch in long, dust-filled columns that touched the floor without warming it. The building had the stillness of a library between its busy hours — a few patrons scattered at the long tables, the creak of a shelving cart somewhere in the stacks, the soft mechanical click of a date stamp being returned to its cradle. Morri stood just inside the entrance and let her eyes adjust. She had not sent word ahead. No message through the courier line, no note left at the circulation desk. The calculation was simple enough: if Colm was being monitored — and after five months of thinking about the slip he had given her, she had to assume the possibility — then a scheduled visit created a record. An appointment was a line item someone could pull. But a woman walking into a branch library on a quiet afternoon, equipment case in hand, browsing the reading room the way any remediation specialist might browse for reference material — that was ordinary. That was invisible. The equipment case hung from her shoulder, its familiar weight settled against her hip. She had carried it every day for years, and the weight had always meant the same thing: tools, calibration instruments, the portable apparatus of her trade. Now it meant something else as well. The shadow record folded into the case lining added almost nothing to the mass. She could not feel the difference. She knew it was there the way she knew the position of a wall in a dark room — not through sensation but through the constant, quiet awareness of something that could not be forgotten. Morri crossed the threshold into the reading room proper. The space was functional in…