Something in her went before she did. That was how she would try to describe it later, alone, and fail. Her weight went forward onto the balls of her feet in the nude heels, and her right shoulder dipped, and she was moving around the end of Marcus's arm before any part of her had agreed to it. She was not going to hit anyone. She would be certain of that afterward, and she would be right. She was going to take the badge. She was going to hold it up to the light, to the camera above the desk, to Marcus, to the whole cold glass lobby, and say there, you see, and the morning would go back to being a morning in which she was correct.
The tote came with her. Both hands were still on its straps, and so she lunged the way a person lunges holding a shopping bag, elbows in, all of her mass behind the leather and canvas, which meant there was nothing out in front of her to catch anything and nothing to stop her once she had started.
Nadia saw it begin in the shoulder.
She had been watching the shoulder the whole time without knowing it. Old habit. You watched the shoulder and the hips, never the face, because the face would lie to you and the hips could not. Ray had told her that, a long time ago in the gym above the tyre shop, with the radiators clanking and the smell of rubber coming up through the floorboards. Ray with his bad knee and his clipboard that he never wrote on. Watch the middle of them, he'd said, tapping her sternum with two fingers. The middle tells you first. She had been twenty-four and furious at everything and she had gone three nights a week for two years and had never fought anyone outside the ring, and had barely fought anyone inside it, and still the lesson had gone into her somewhere below thought and stayed there like a key in a coat pocket.
The shoulder dipped. The beige blazer folded at the crease of the elbow. The woman's face, which had been tight and pale and very carefully made up, came forward past the edge of Marcus's forearm, and the distance between them, which had been almost nothing and then a half step, became nothing again.
Nadia's left arm came up. She did not lift it. It lifted, forearm angled across her own chest, the leather of the sleeve creaking, a sound that seemed absurdly loud. Her hips turned. Her right foot pivoted on the white sneaker, and the rubber sole bit the tile and squealed, one short bright note. The turn took the woman's incoming weight off the line of Nadia's body the way you take a door off its swing, and then Nadia's arm, the flat of her forearm and the heel of her hand together, met the woman's shoulder and the tote strap and the soft padded edge of the blazer, and pushed.
It was not a punch. There was no fist in it. It was a shove with the hips behind it, short and complete, the kind Ray had drilled into them against the heavy bag before he ever let them throw anything. Make space. Make space and get out. The point was never to hurt. The point was distance.
She felt the woman's collarbone under the blazer, very slightly, through layers. She felt the stiff leather corner of the tote's handle dig into her wrist. And then the contact was gone, and the space was there.
Vanessa had no word for what happened to her body next. Her feet were still trying to go forward and the rest of her was going back. The heels skidded. The left one turned under her a little and the ankle held, just, and she would feel it at the stairs that evening. Her arms did not let go of the bag, which was the wrong thing, which meant they could not go out behind her to catch her, and so the bag rose up against her stomach and her chest like something she was rescuing from a flood.
The lobby swung. She saw the drop ceiling, the squares of light set in it, white and flat and humming. She saw the curtain wall of glass, the street on the other side the colour of dishwater, a bus going past with its windows fogged. She saw, briefly and with total clarity, her own reflection in the floor, upside down and smeared across the pale tiles, a beige shape tipping like a vase.
The backs of her legs found the sofa before the rest of her did. The grey modular section caught her just behind the knees, the hard welted edge of the cushion, and her legs folded at the joint, and the fold sent her down.
"Whoa!" she said. It came out high, almost a laugh, a sound she had not made since a fairground ride when she was nine. "Oh!"
She landed hard. The cushion took her, sighed under her, gave up a small puff of air that smelled of leather cleaner and other people's coats. Her spine met the backrest and her head snapped back an inch and stopped. Her teeth clicked together. One heel came off the floor entirely and dangled. And the tote, finally released because her hands had at last remembered they were hands, slid down her lap and off her thigh and slumped against her hip in the gap between her and the armrest, its leather handles folding over onto the grey like something that had fainted.
Marcus was already moving and it did not matter.
He had seen the dip of her shoulder half a second after Nadia had, which in his old life would have been half a second too late to matter and in this one was simply too late. Twelve years in uniform, most of them in depots and motor pools and loading bays, and the instinct that rose in him was the one the sergeant major had shouted into all of them on the parade ground: get big. Get wide. Fill the gap. His feet went out, shoulder width and then more, his good leather shoes slapping the tile, and his arms went out from his sides with the palms open and the fingers spread, one hand towards each woman, a man trying to hold apart two halves of a door that had already closed.
He held the pose. He would remember that, with embarrassment, at his kitchen table that night. He held it for a full second after there was nothing left to hold apart. His arms hung there in the air on either side of him like he was about to be measured for a suit.
On his left Vanessa Hale was on the sofa. On his right the woman in the leather jacket had stepped back. Between them there was clean empty floor, and his own reflection standing on it, wide and foolish and doubled.