She turned. Not away, not completely. She turned slightly sideways, her left shoulder coming forward and her right shoulder dropping back, so that she presented less of herself to the woman in the blazer, the jacket creaking softly as the leather folded at the elbow. It was the angle Dennis had drilled into her until she could do it asleep, chin tucked, side on, a smaller target, and it was also just the angle of someone who has had enough and wants to be anywhere else. Both things at once. Her hands stayed low, loose, by her thighs. Her eyes stayed on Vanessa, not on Marcus, because Marcus was not the one she was watching.
She was so tired, suddenly. Not in her body, which was humming and ready, but somewhere behind her breastbone, in a place that had been tired for a long time. Fourteen years of hands reaching for her badge, real and figurative. Fourteen years of proving it. She had ridden here through the rain thinking about the dispatch floor on fifteen and the routing software that had failed in the spring and the people who had worked double shifts to cover for it, and none of that had gone anywhere, it was all still there in her head waiting for her, and she wanted to get to it. She wanted to go and do her job. That was all. That was all she had ever wanted in any of these rooms.
"Just leave me alone."
She said it quietly. It was not a command and it was not a plea. It came out flat and worn, almost conversational, the voice of a woman on a late train saying it to a drunk who has been talking at her for three stops. It was, she would think later, possibly the most honest thing she said all day.
Then the second after it.
The words were gone and nobody had filled the space where they had been. The lobby's sound came back in to take their place, the long electric hum of the air-conditioning pushing warm dry air down through the ceiling vents, the faint tick of something cooling in the light fittings, the distant hiss of tyres on the wet street outside, softened by the double glazing to almost nothing. Behind them, at the desk, Sal said "Hang on," into his phone and did not hang up. The red EXIT sign glowed above the glass doors at the far end, steady, the letters reflected upside down in the polished floor in a long pink smear.
They stood where they had arrived. Nadia on the left, her body angled, the white badge hanging straight down the centre of her chest again on its navy lanyard, perfectly still now. Marcus in the middle, a little behind the line between them, his arms still out, his left palm toward Vanessa and his right toward Nadia, his weight on the balls of his feet. Vanessa on the right with her back to the grey sofa, close enough to it that the hem of her blazer was almost brushing the arm of it, both her fists on the straps of the tote at her stomach, her knuckles gone white and then, at the joints, faintly yellow.
Marcus started to breathe out. He felt it begin, the long exhale he always allowed himself when a thing had gone from loud to quiet, the moment in the depot when the wrench hit the concrete. He began to turn his head toward the woman in the jacket, to say, in the gentler voice, Ma'am, I'm sorry about this, could I just. His eyes were already leaving Vanessa.
And Vanessa, who had heard "leave me alone" as she heard everything that morning, through a wall of glass and blood, felt something in her that had been bent too far for too long begin to go. It started in her feet. Her weight, which had been back on her heels since the stranger's wrist knocked her hand away, began to roll forward, slowly, onto the balls of her feet, onto the narrow pointed toes of the nude heels, and her calves tightened under the camel trousers. Her hands twisted on the straps of the tote, the leather creaking, a quarter turn inward, as if she were wringing it. The air went into her chest in one hard pull and stayed there. She was not looking at Marcus anymore. She was looking past his shoulder, past his open hand, at the white card hanging on the other woman's chest, at that blank square of plastic with no face on it, and the whole lobby narrowed down to it, to the gap beside Marcus's arm, to the twenty or thirty centimetres of bright empty air between where she was and where she had decided, at some point she would never afterwards be able to locate, that she had to be.
For one breath nobody moved. The air conditioning went on breathing above them, steady and indifferent, and somewhere back by the turnstiles a gate arm reset itself with a small mechanical clack that no one else heard.
Vanessa heard the words, though. Just leave me alone. She heard them the way she heard a client say they were reviewing their options, which was to say she heard what sat underneath. It was the thing people said when they had been caught. It was what a teenager said in a department store with something zipped inside a coat. Leave me alone meant there was something to be left alone with. And the woman had turned sideways, turned her shoulder, the way you angle a bag you don't want searched, and the white card on the navy lanyard swung a little with the turn and settled against the grey T-shirt, and the card had no face on it. No face, no name. TEMP. Anybody could print TEMP.
There was Marcus, too, his arm out in front of her like a railway barrier, and the fact of that arm made it worse. He was supposed to be on her side. She had written the memo. She had sat in the third-floor conference room with the building manager and the contractor and Marcus himself, three weeks ago, with the stolen laptops still listed on a whiteboard, and she had said the words that ended up in the memo verbatim: challenge anyone who does not obviously belong. She had said obviously. She had been proud of obviously. And now here was Marcus Bell holding her back as if she were the problem, while the woman in the leather jacket stood exactly where the bags had been taken, on exactly the square of tile where Vanessa had stood that Tuesday afternoon looking at an empty sofa.