"I don't mind," Yvette said, and meant it.
It was on the afternoon trash route, on the third floor, that Tom Becker first looked at her twice.
The security office was a glass box next to the elevator bank, and Tom Becker sat in it the way a captain sits on a bridge β fifty-two, broad-shouldered, eyes that never stopped moving across the monitors. Yvette's cart rattled past, and he glanced up, and glanced away, and then glanced back, and she felt it happen, the small click of recognition misfiring. He stood up and came to the doorway.
"Excuse me," he said. "Have we met?"
It was the second time that day. Yvette kept her hands on the cart. "I don't think so. I'm temp. Started today."
"You were in the lobby yesterday." It wasn't a question. "Morning. There was a spill. Coffee."
Yvette's pulse did something she ordered it not to do. "A lot of people were in the lobby yesterday."
"Yeah." He studied her β the badge, the polo, the cart. "Yeah, I guess." He didn't move. "You look like somebody, though. Somebody I saw in a picture. In the β" He stopped himself. Shook his head. "Never mind. Long day."
He went back to his monitors, but Yvette saw him pick up his phone a minute later, and she saw the way he angled the screen away from the glass, and she knew, with the cold certainty of someone who had spent a lifetime reading rooms, that Tom Becker had just looked at the acquisition announcement photo on the company intranet, and that the photo had a name under it, and that the name was hers.
She finished the trash route with steady hands. She emptied fourteen bins without missing one. And all the while she thought about what it meant that the head of building security had recognized her and said nothing β whether it was loyalty, or fear, or simply the same careful quiet she had seen in the lobby yesterday, the instinct of people who have learned that noticing things out loud is dangerous.
At four-thirty, Rosa walked her back to the locker room and showed her how to log her hours on the temp timesheet. "You did good today," Rosa said. "Most temps, day one, I spend half my time fixing. You β you pay attention." She hesitated. "You sure you never did this before?"
"My mother did," Yvette said. It was the truest thing she had said all day. "Twenty years. She taught me the cloth-folding thing."
Rosa smiled, and this time the tiredness didn't lift from her eyes β it deepened into something warmer. "Then she taught you right." She zipped her bag. "See you tomorrow, honey. Six sharp. We do the executive restrooms on Wednesdays. That's always an adventure."
Yvette changed her shoes, returned the radio to Harlan's successor, and walked up the ramp into the evening mist. Her back ached. Her thumb throbbed where the blister had risen and broken. Her polo shirt smelled of detergent and other people's coffee. And as she stood at the curb waiting for the car Denise had sent β a different car, a different driver, nothing that traced back β she thought about the morning's laminated ROUTINE, peeling at the edges, updated by hand for eighteen years by a woman the company called invaluable and kept exactly where she was.
Tomorrow was Wednesday. Executive restrooms. And somewhere above the service corridors, in offices with views, decisions were being made about people like Rosa by people who had never pushed a cart. Yvette had come to see the corners. She was beginning to understand that the corners were where the whole building actually stood.
Wednesday began with the executive restrooms, which Rosa had promised would be an adventure, and which turned out to be an education of a different kind.
They were on the eighth floor, behind a door with no sign, and they were nothing like the restrooms on the lower floors. The tile was heated. The mirrors were the size of walls. There were fresh orchids on the counter β real ones, replaced twice a week, Rosa said, by a florist with a standing order β and a small refrigerator stocked with bottled water and folded hand towels that cost, Rosa told her, four dollars apiece.
"Four dollars," Yvette repeated, wringing out the mop. "For a hand towel."
"For a hand towel." Rosa polished a faucet until it shone. "Last month I asked if we could switch to the regular towels, save the money, put it toward the break room microwave that's been sparking since March. You know what I got told?"
"What?"