She didn't, and she examined her reasons while the woman was still talking. Part of it was simple. She had been told about the announcement at ten, and she had agreed with Gerald that she would keep her head down until then, walk the floors, see the place before the place put its best face on for her. That had been the whole point of coming in early. There was no sense in blowing it in the lobby to a stranger with a nice bag.
The other part was older and less tidy. She wanted to know what this building did with a person it didn't recognise. She had been that person in a lot of buildings. She had stood in reception areas in steel-toed boots with a clipboard under her arm, sent by her own company to fix something, and been asked if she was there about the vending machines. She had been told, at twenty-six, by a regional director with a signet ring, that she was very impressive but didn't really look like management, and she had thanked him, gone home, and written the sentence on a strip of masking tape that she had stuck to the inside of her toolbox lid, where it stayed for six years. She did not need to tell anyone who she was in order to be treated decently. That was the principle. Nobody should have to.
And then, under all of it, there was the thing her father said whenever she called him about some fight at work: You don't owe anybody your paperwork, Nads. You just don't hit first.
"Priya," she said. "From HR."
"Priya." The woman tried the name out as if tasting it for poison. "Priya who?"
"Raman, I think."
"You think."
"I've met her twice." Nadia shrugged one shoulder. The jacket creaked. "She's gone for coffee. She'll be down in a few minutes."
"She's gone for coffee," the woman repeated, "and left you here."
"That's generally how it works when someone goes for coffee."
She hadn't meant it to come out as dry as it did. It was a reflex, the deadpan, a thing that had got her through dispatch-floor arguments at three in the morning and once, memorably, through a customs audit. She saw it land. The pleasant face stayed exactly where it was, but something behind it went a shade colder, the way a room does when someone opens a window you didn't know was there.
Across the lobby, the guard at reception was still on the phone. He had turned his chair a little so his back was half to them, and he was spelling out a postcode letter by letter. Behind him, beyond the turnstiles, a corridor ran back toward the lifts and a set of grey service doors. Nobody was coming through any of them.
Marcus was in the back corridor with his radio turned low and a clipboard he did not need, checking the fire door by the post room because the alarm panel had thrown a fault at six that morning and the contractor swore blind it was nothing. It was usually nothing. He pushed the bar, felt the magnet let go, let it swing back and catch. He initialled the sheet. Through the narrow wired-glass panel at the end of the corridor he could see a strip of the lobby, the turnstiles, the back of Sal's head, a slice of the window wall going grey to grey.
He heard the heels before he saw anyone. He would have known those heels anywhere. Vanessa Hale walked like she was signing her name on the floor.
He tucked the clipboard under his arm and went back to the panel by the post room, because he had promised himself he would read every single line of that fault log, and because whatever Vanessa was doing this morning was, for the next five minutes at least, not his problem.
"What's your name?" Vanessa said.
"Nadia."
"Nadia what?"
The woman tilted her head slightly, studying her, and for a second Vanessa had the absurd impression that she was being assessed for something, a job, a loan. "Is there a problem?" the woman said.
"I don't know. Is there?" Vanessa heard her own voice and was pleased with it. Light, reasonable, a touch amused. The voice she used with clients who were trying to renegotiate in the last week of a quarter. "We had an incident in this exact spot a few weeks ago. Somebody walked in off the street and stood more or less where you're standing and helped himself to three bags. So you'll forgive me if I'm a bit careful about people hanging around the lounge with no badge."
"I've got a badge."
"You've got a card on a string."
The woman looked down at it, then back up. She did not touch it. "HR gave it to me this morning."
"It doesn't have a photo on it."
"No."
"Or a name."
"No," the woman agreed. "It's a temp."
"A temp." Vanessa let the word hang, and then she took a step forward, a small one, the kind you could take back. "Every Ardent badge has a photo. Even the contractor ones. That was the whole point of the security review. I know, because I wrote half of it."
"Then you'll know the review doesn't cover what happens when the printer gets your name wrong."
"I'm sorry?"
"Nothing." The woman glanced toward reception, then toward the doors, then back. "Look. She'll be here in a minute. You can ask her yourself."
It was the glance that did it. Later, much later, sitting at her kitchen table with the tote in front of her like a piece of evidence, Vanessa would try to find the exact place where she had stopped being careful and started being something else, and she would keep coming back to that glance toward the doors. At the time it looked like a person checking her exits. It looked like a person measuring how far it was to the street.
She moved again. Not toward the woman this time but around her, a slow half circle on the clicking tile until she was standing with the grey sofas a step or two behind her and the long window wall running away at her side, between the stranger and the lounge, as though there were still bags on those cushions that needed someone to stand in front of them. The woman turned with her, unhurried, and ended up facing her square, with the length of the lobby and the gates and Sal's desk somewhere off past her left shoulder. Vanessa found that she had put the tote across her body without deciding to. Her left hand was on the strap. Her right hand hung at her side, the fingers working at nothing.
"I'm not asking HR," Vanessa said. "I'm asking you. It's a simple question. Which floor are you on?"
"I'm not on one yet."
"So you don't work here."
"I start today."
"Doing what?"
The woman looked at her for a long moment. There was no hostility in it that Vanessa could put her finger on, which was maddening. There was something else, a kind of tired attention, as if she had heard this exact conversation many times before in many different lobbies and was waiting politely to see whether this version would end differently.