"I'm not going to talk about this in the lobby," Nadia said. "Not with you, not with anyone. There'll be a proper conversation, with HR in the room, and you'll be able to say everything you want to say. I'll listen to all of it. But not here, and not now."
Vanessa closed her mouth.
From the vestibule came a small, strangled noise, and everyone turned.
It was the young man. Owen. Priya had forgotten him completely; he had been holding the door for her when the shouting started, and he was still standing in the gap between the inner and outer doors with one foot on the black entry mat and his phone in his right hand, held flat against his chest now, screen inward, like someone hiding a hand of cards.
He was twenty-four and had worked at Ardent for seven months, and he wanted very badly at this moment to be on the eighteenth floor in his cubicle by the printer, putting dispatch data into pivot tables. Everyone was looking at his phone. He could feel them looking at it.
"I didn't film," he said. "I didn't, I swear. I got it out, I had it out, I know that looks, but I didn't press anything. I just." He swallowed. "I didn't."
He fumbled the phone round and held it up, screen out, as if that proved anything: his lock screen, a photo of a brown dog in a raincoat, the time in large white numerals. 8:54.
Nadia looked at him for a moment. Then she nodded, once.
"Okay," she said. "Thank you."
"I can show you the camera roll, if you want, I don't mind..."
"I believe you." She thought about it. "If anyone asks you about this morning, tell them that. That you didn't film it. Because it's true, and because it's the only part of this that's yours to tell."
Owen nodded too many times. He put the phone in his back pocket and then, after a second, took his hand away from it, as if it were hot.
Priya had come forward at last, past the rubber mat and onto the tile, and the coffees in their carrier had sloshed a little through the sip holes so that a brown bead was running down one cup. She was conscious of the envelope under her arm, which now felt like a prop in a play nobody had rehearsed. She was conscious of Vanessa Hale on the sofa. She had sat in on two of Vanessa's team's exit interviews this year. She knew things about Vanessa from those interviews that she had written up in neutral language and filed. She was trying very hard not to think about them now.
"Ms. Kerr," she said, and then, "Nadia. Do you want to go up?"
"Yes," Nadia said. "I think I'd better."
She looked once more at the sofa. Vanessa did not look back.
"Marcus," Nadia said. "If she wants first aid for that wrist, would you make sure she gets it? And if she doesn't, that's her call."
"Yes, ma'am. Nadia."
Priya tapped her own card on the reader of the nearest speed gate, and the glass panels folded back with a pneumatic sigh, and Nadia walked through. The panels closed behind her. Priya badged herself through after, fumbling, the carrier tilting, and caught up with her at the elevator bank, where three of the six cars stood open and lit and empty, waiting for the nine o'clock rush.
They took the one on the end. Priya pressed 19. The doors slid together, brushed steel with a faint reflection in them of two women, one in a leather jacket and one in a plum knit dress, both looking straight ahead.
The elevator began to rise. There was a small, specific heaviness in the knees, and the sound of the cables, and nothing else.
"I'm so sorry," Priya said again. She knew she was saying it too much. "I should have stayed with you. I should have walked you up through the garage stairs and got security to let you through. I didn't think. I really didn't think anyone would."
"You went to get coffee," Nadia said. "That's not a crime." She held out her hand. "Is one of those mine?"
Priya pulled the black coffee out of the carrier and handed it over, and that was when she saw it.
Nadia's hand was shaking.
Not much. If you hadn't been holding the cup out toward it you might not have seen. But the coffee, when Nadia took it, trembled in a fine fast ring across its surface through the sip hole, and Nadia looked down at it and seemed, for a second, mildly surprised, as though it belonged to someone else. Then she brought her left hand up and wrapped it round the cup as well, so that she was holding it in both hands, the way you'd hold a mug on a cold morning at a bus stop, and the ring on the surface went on trembling anyway.
Priya did not know what to say. She looked at the floor indicator. 6. 7.
"Give me thirty seconds," Nadia said quietly.
So Priya gave her thirty seconds. She watched the numbers. 9. 10. She could hear Nadia breathing, slow and deliberate, in through the nose, out through the mouth, the way they taught you in the wellness sessions Priya herself had organised last spring and that eleven people had attended. Nadia's eyes were closed. Her shoulders were down. Only her hands went on doing what they were doing, and her jaw had set hard enough that Priya could see the muscle at its hinge.
Behind Nadia's closed eyes was not the lobby. It was a loading bay in a container port at four in the morning, ten years ago, and a shift supervisor twice her size telling her she'd got lost on the way to the office, love, and then putting his hand flat on her chest to move her out of his way. She had moved his hand instead. That time she had not stepped back afterwards. That time there had been a disciplinary hearing, and she had very nearly lost the job, and her father had driven three hours on his day off to sit in the car park outside in case she needed a lift home. He hadn't come in. He had just been there. When she came out, he'd been asleep with the seat tipped back and a sandwich on his chest.
She had promised herself after that. Not never again, because you couldn't promise that, not if you were the kind of person people kept putting their hands on. But that the next time it happened she would be the one who stepped back. The one who kept her voice down. The one who let the paperwork carry it.
She thought she had done that. She would know for certain when she saw the footage. Her hands didn't seem convinced.
- 14.
She opened her eyes.
"Okay," she said. The coffee had stopped moving. Not completely, but nearly. "Okay."
"Are you sure? We could go to the wellness room first, there's one on 16, it's quiet, nobody uses it..."
"I'm sure." Nadia took a sip of the coffee. It was too hot and she drank it anyway. "This is very good, by the way."