What she needed to know was what happened in this building on the days when nobody thought the owner was watching. What happened in the hallways. What happened to the Rosas. What happened to the people who were told, in so many words, that they were the kind of people who missed the corners.
She took out her phone and called her chief of staff.
"Denise," she said. "Change of plans. Cancel my schedule for the week. Tell the board I'm doing site visits."
"All week? Yvette, the town hall is Friday—"
"I'll be at the town hall. But until then, I need something else." She watched the rain hit the pavement in hard silver lines. "I need a temp placement. Facilities. One week. Through an outside vendor, nothing that traces back to us."
There was a long pause. "You want to go undercover."
"I want to see the corners," Yvette said. "Somebody in that building thinks people like me miss them. I'd like to find out what else he thinks."
"Yvette." Denise's voice dropped. "That's — the liability alone, if anyone—"
"Priya will paper it. Full indemnification, workers' comp through the vendor, everything clean. Nobody at Crestview knows my face — the acquisition was all lawyers and press releases, and I haven't set foot in that building until today." She paused. "Two people know. You and Priya. That's it."
Another pause, longer this time. Then Denise laughed, a short disbelieving sound. "Your mother would say you've lost your mind."
"My mother," Yvette said, "mopped floors for twenty years and never once missed a corner. She'd say it's about time somebody checked."
She ended the call and stood in the rain a moment longer. Inside the glass lobby, the silver car turned slowly on its platform, gleaming under its cone of light, going nowhere. Yvette looked at it for a long time, and then she turned up the collar of her blazer and walked back out into the weather, already becoming someone else.
The service entrance was on the west side of the building, down a ramp Yvette had never noticed from the front, past the dumpsters and the delivery bays, through a steel door with a keypad and a small sign that said STAFF ONLY in letters that had faded from black to grey. It was 5:47 on Tuesday morning, still dark, the rain reduced to a thin mist that hung in the floodlights like breath. Yvette stood at the door in a grey polo shirt two sizes too big, dark work pants, and steel-toed shoes that pinched her left foot, holding a paper badge that read YVETTE L. — BRIGHTPATH STAFFING — FACILITIES in block letters under a photo taken that morning in a strip-mall studio, in which she looked tired and unremarkable and, she thought, oddly like her mother at that age.
Priya had papered it overnight. A one-week placement, full indemnification, workers' compensation through the vendor, a background check run under the temp name, everything clean and boring and filed in triplicate. Denise had called at midnight to say it was done and to ask, for the third time, whether Yvette had lost her mind. Yvette had said she would call every evening at nine. That was the whole plan. Everything else she would figure out with a mop in her hands.
The door buzzed and swung inward, and a man in his sixties with a clipboard looked her up and down.
"Brightpath?" he said.
"Yes, sir. Yvette L."
"I'm Harlan. Night shift lead. You're with Rosa today — Rosa Jimenez, she runs dayside floors one through four. She'll show you the cart, the closets, the routine." He handed her a radio the size of a brick. "Channel three. Don't lose it. Break room's down that hall, lockers to the left. Rosa gets in at six. Don't touch anything with a red tag."
He turned away before she could answer, already absorbed in his clipboard, and Yvette stood in the corridor with the radio in her hand and felt the building change around her. From the lobby, Crestview had been glass and light. From here it was concrete and humming pipes, the smell of detergent and old coffee, bulletin boards layered with notices about parking validations and a lost glove and a signup sheet for the holiday party three months away. Somewhere above her, thirty-five hundred people would arrive in the next two hours and never know any of this existed.
She found the locker room and changed her shoes for the spare pair she'd brought, the ones that fit. She found the break room, where a microwave older than some of the engineers sat next to a refrigerator covered in magnets, and a handwritten sign above the sink said YOUR MOTHER DOESN'T WORK HERE — CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF, which made her smile for the first time that morning. She was pouring coffee from a stained pot when Rosa Jimenez walked in.