People knowing what, she thought now. She didn't remember.
One of the leather handles had a long scuff along its underside where it must have caught on the sofa frame as it fell. A pale line through the dark patina, like a scratch on a car door.
She reached down with her left hand, because her right was no good to her now, and took hold of the handle. The bag was heavier than she expected. It had her laptop in it, and the Brenmoor deck printed out and annotated in two colours of ink, and her makeup bag, and a spare pair of tights, and a small bottle of the perfume she'd worn since the year before the divorce, and her house keys on their silver fob, and a paperback she had been carrying for four months and not opened. She lifted it out of the gap. It came free with a soft scrape of canvas against leather.
She set it on her knees and held it there, both hands on the handles, in front of her stomach, exactly the way she always held it.
Then she noticed she was doing that, and she did not know what to do with her hands instead, and so she went on sitting very still on the grey sofa under the red EXIT sign, with the gates opening and closing and opening again in front of her for everyone who belonged, holding on.
The nineteenth floor smelled of carpet shampoo and toner. Someone had cleaned over the weekend, and the corridor outside the executive suite still held the faint chemical sweetness of it, along with the rain that had come in on everyone's coats. Priya walked half a step ahead, which Nadia understood was a kindness. It meant Nadia did not have to be looked at for the length of the hallway.
The coffees had not survived. Priya had set them down somewhere in the vestibule, and one of them had tipped, and she had left both behind, so now her hands were empty except for the small plastic sleeve holding the corrected badge. She kept turning it over as she walked. At the end of the corridor she stopped and held it out.
"It's right this time," she said. "Two r's. I checked it in the light."
Nadia took it and looked at her own face, a photo from the onboarding portal, taken against a kitchen wall in her apartment with her hair still damp. NADIA KERR. CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER. The lanyard was the same navy as the temporary one. She slid the card into the inside pocket of her jacket and left the white TEMP card where it was.
Priya opened her mouth, and closed it, and seemed to decide that this was not the moment to have an opinion about lanyards.
Gerald Hask's office took up the north corner. Through the glass wall Nadia could see him standing, not sitting, with a phone at his ear and his free hand pressed flat on top of his head as if to keep it attached. He saw them and lowered the phone without saying goodbye to whoever was on it.
"Sal called me," he said, when Priya had closed the door. "The guard. He called my assistant, actually, and she called me. He said there'd been an altercation." Gerald said the word the way people say diagnoses. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"Is she?"
"She landed on a sofa," Nadia said. "She didn't want my help getting up. I think her wrist may be sore. Someone should check."
Gerald looked at Priya, and Priya nodded and wrote something on the back of her hand with a pen, which was so much like something Nadia's father would do that it steadied her a little. The office was large and underfurnished in the way of men who had built companies and then forgotten to update the rooms they built them in. A long desk with a green-shaded lamp. A rowing machine nobody used, angled toward the window. Framed photographs of trucks, an early warehouse, a ribbon-cutting where Gerald still had dark hair. Rain moved down the glass in slow, crooked lines, and below, nineteen floors down, the street was a grey channel with red tail-lights crawling along it.
"Sit," Gerald said. "Please. Celia's on her way up."
Nadia sat. She put her hands on her knees, palms down, and kept them there. The shaking from the elevator had passed, but it had left behind a kind of hollowness in her forearms, the feeling after a long carry when you set the box down and your arms keep expecting weight.
Celia Moss arrived four minutes later with a laptop under one arm and a cardigan buttoned wrong. She was in her fifties, small and precise, with reading glasses pushed up into short silver hair, and she had the slightly flattened expression of a person who had heard many versions of many mornings and believed none of them until she had read them twice. She shook Nadia's hand. Her grip was dry and quick.
"I'm sorry we're meeting like this," she said. "I'd planned a welcome folder. It has a pen in it."
"I like pens."
"It's a good pen." Celia sat down, opened the laptop, and the expression returned. "Before anything else, I need to hear what happened from you. Not a summary. What you saw and what you did, in order. I'll take notes. You can stop whenever you want."
So Nadia told it. She told it the way she would have described a forklift incident on a loading dock, because that was the only way she knew how to describe anything that had happened to her body. The temp badge failing at the gate. Priya going for coffee. The woman in the beige blazer coming through the doors and looking at her, then looking at her again. The questions. Who are you here to see. Are you waiting for someone. The distance closing. The hand coming toward the badge.
"Did she touch you before the push?" Celia asked.
"She reached for my badge. I knocked her hand away. Then Marcus was between us, and she came past him."
"Came past him how?"
Nadia thought about it. She could see it, but seeing it was different from saying it. "Fast. Forward. Her shoulder first. I put my arm up and turned and moved her off. That's all I did. She went back further than I meant. Her legs caught the sofa."
"Did you intend to push her onto the sofa?"
"I intended for her not to be on me."
Celia typed. Gerald had sat down at last, on the edge of the desk, and was looking at the rowing machine.
"Did you identify yourself at any point before the physical contact?" Celia said.
"I said I worked here."
"Did you say what your role was?"
"No."
Celia's fingers paused. She did not look up. "Can I ask why not?"
There were several true answers, and Nadia chose the plainest one. "Because it shouldn't matter. I was a person standing in a lobby with a badge on. If the badge didn't work, that's a systems problem, and there's a guard for that. I wasn't going to start my first day by telling someone who I was so they'd be nicer to me."