"It's from the cart on the corner. The man's called Abdi. He's been there longer than the building has."
"I'll go and thank him." She took another sip. Then, without looking at Priya, she said, "Who is she?"
Priya hesitated, which was its own answer, and then decided there was no point.
"Vanessa Hale. Senior Director, Client Accounts. She's been here eleven years. She has Brenmoor, and Kestrel, and most of the retail book." Priya paused. "She was," she said, and stopped.
"She was the internal candidate," Nadia said.
Priya looked at her.
"Gerald mentioned there was someone. He didn't give me a name. I didn't ask." Nadia turned the cup slowly in her hands. "I'm guessing nobody told her it was me."
"Nobody told anyone. It was meant to be at ten."
"Right." Nadia breathed out through her nose, a short dry sound that was very nearly a laugh and not quite. "Well. Hell of a way to meet the accounts team."
Priya, to her horror, almost laughed, and turned it into a cough.
- 18.
"I'm going to need to talk to Gerald before the all-hands," Nadia said. "And Celia. With Marcus's report if it's done, and the footage. I'd like it in a room with a door. And Priya." She turned her head and looked at her, and Priya saw that her eyes were dry and clear and very tired. "Nobody puts her on the defensive before she's had a chance to speak. Not you, not Celia, not Gerald. Whatever she did, she gets the same process anyone else would get. Fair, and on the record."
"Of course."
"I mean it."
"I know," said Priya, and found that she did.
- The elevator slowed, and there was that small lift in the stomach, and the doors opened onto the carpet and the frosted glass and the long window at the end of the corridor showing the city laid out grey and wet and enormous under a low lid of cloud. Somewhere a printer was warming up. Somebody's radio was playing the traffic news.
Nadia stepped out first. Before she went, she reached up with her free hand and took hold of the temporary badge on its navy lanyard and looked at it, the black block letters, TEMP — ARDENT, no photo, no name. Then she let it drop back against her chest.
"Can I have the real one?" she said.
Priya gave her the envelope. Nadia tucked it under her arm, unopened, and walked down the corridor toward Gerald Hask's office with her coffee held in both hands.
In the lobby, the morning had started again without asking anyone's permission.
The ten-to-nine wave came through the doors the way it did every weekday: people shaking out umbrellas on the mat, unwinding scarves, fishing for cards in coat pockets and lanyards from the necks of jumpers. The speed gates sighed and folded and sighed. Somebody's trainers squeaked on the wet tile. A man from the insurance firm on the eleventh floor said good morning to Sal, and Sal said good morning back, a beat late. Owen had gone through the gates with his head down and his hands in his pockets, not looking at the sofa, not looking at anyone.
Marcus had gone into the security office behind reception. Vanessa could see the door from where she sat, ajar, a slice of desk and the blue glow of a monitor and his white shirt sleeve moving as he typed. He had come over to her before he went. He had crouched down, not too close, so that his face was level with hers, and said in that big voice made small, "Ms. Hale, I've got a first aid kit and an ice pack in the office. I can bring it to you here, or you can come in, or you can tell me to get lost. Up to you." And she had said, "I'm fine, Marcus," and he had looked at her for a moment longer than was comfortable and then said, "All right," in very nearly the same tone that woman had used, and stood up, his knees cracking, and gone.
Nobody else was looking at her. That was almost the worst part. The people coming in glanced at the lounge the way you glance at furniture, and saw a woman in a beige blazer sitting on a grey sofa, and thought nothing, because there was nothing in the picture to think about. A woman who'd sat down to check her emails. A woman waiting for a car. If any of them knew her, they did not stop. Perhaps that was kindness. Perhaps, from the outside, she looked exactly as she always looked, composed and expensive and slightly impatient. She did not know any more what she looked like from the outside. She realised she had never known.
The CCTV dome above the reception desk was a small black hemisphere, the size of half a grapefruit. She had walked under it twice a day for years without once looking up. She looked up now. It looked back, without expression, the way it had been looking all morning.
Wide angle. The whole lounge and the gates. No audio.
So there would be no sound of what she'd said. There would only be the picture. Her own body leaning in. Her own hand going down for the badge. Her head thrust forward. Then Marcus. Then her, going round him.
She thought of Gerald watching it. She thought of Celia Moss watching it with that pleasant, unreadable face she wore in disciplinary meetings, a pen held lightly over a pad. She thought of Lena. She thought, absurdly, of Brenmoor's procurement director, who had told her on the phone on Friday that he was "re-evaluating the relationship," and who would never see this footage, and who she nonetheless imagined watching it with his arms folded, nodding as if it confirmed something.
She thought of the woman's hand held out to her, palm up, with the scar across the thumb.
Are you hurt?
Her wrist was beginning to swell. She could feel the tightness of it against the cuff of her blouse, a slow, heated pressure. It would bruise. Tomorrow it would be the colour of a plum, and she would have to choose a blouse with a longer sleeve, and she understood, with a clarity that felt like cold water, that she was already planning how to hide it.
The sofa cushion beside her had a dent in it where she'd landed. The leather was creased in a shallow fan.
Her tote was still down in the gap between the two modules, tipped on its side. She could see the curve of the tan canvas and the repeating gold-brown pattern of the monogram, the little interlocking letters that she had once, six years ago, stood in a shop on a cold bright avenue in another country and touched with one finger before she'd allowed herself to pick it up. She'd paid with the bonus from her promotion. She'd carried it out of the shop in its own dust bag, inside its own box, inside its own carrier, like something that needed protecting from the weather and from the world. Afterwards she had sat on a bench in a park and called her mother and told her what she'd bought and how much it had cost, and her mother had been quiet for a long time and then said, Well, I hope it makes you happy, and Vanessa had said, It's not about happy, Mum, it's about people knowing.