Gerald stood up and walked to the window and stood there with his back to them. The rain had thickened. Below, a bus pulled away from the stop on Calder Street and left a pale wake on the road.
"All right," he said. "Here is the part where I say the thing nobody wants to hear, because it's my job to say it." He turned. "It's twenty past nine. In forty minutes I'm going to stand up in front of two hundred and sixty people and tell them that after six months of searching we found the person who's going to help me fix this company. And somewhere between fifteen and two hundred of those people already know, or will know by then, that at ten to nine the new COO put an eleven-year senior director on a lobby sofa."
"That's not what happened," Priya said, and then looked surprised that she had said it.
"I know it isn't. I just watched it. I'm saying what it becomes." He spread his hands. "This year we lost Halvorsen. We lost Pell & Quint. The routing rollout went out with a bug that sent eleven trucks to the wrong depot in one morning, and somebody posted the map online. Brenmoor is sniffing around other carriers, and Vanessa is the only one Brenmoor's people actually like. I am not saying this to protect her. I'm saying it because the optics of today are very, very bad, and I'd be a fool to pretend otherwise."
"What are you suggesting?" Celia said. Her tone was neutral, which in her, Nadia suspected, was a warning.
"Push the all-hands. A day, two days. Let it settle. Have Vanessa work from home this week, call it a personal matter, and the three of us sort it out quietly. Nadia gets a clean start on Wednesday."
"No," Nadia said.
Gerald looked at her.
"With respect," she said. "No to all of it." She took her hands off her knees. "If we push the all-hands, the story becomes the reason we pushed it. People aren't stupid. Half of your dispatch floor works nights and arranged to come in for this. If I'm not up there at ten, the first thing anyone learns about me is that I hide. And you can't call it a personal matter for Vanessa, because it isn't one, and because the moment we start inventing reasons, the camera footage turns into something we were hiding instead of something we handled."
"There's a policy," Celia said, before Gerald could answer, and Nadia had the sense that Celia had been waiting for exactly this opening. "I'm not trying to be obstructive. But we wrote it after the Hollis complaint two years ago, Gerald, and you signed it. A physical altercation between employees, regardless of seniority, triggers a formal review. Statements from everyone involved. The footage preserved. The parties separated while it's investigated, which normally means paid administrative leave for at least one of them. And no decision until the person accused has given their account. In writing, if she wants, with someone present."
"I'm one of the parties," Nadia said.
"You are."
"Then I shouldn't decide what happens to her. Not alone." She looked at Celia. "You run it. I'll give a statement, which I just did, and I'll sign it. If there's a meeting about consequences, I'd like to be in the room, because she should have to look at the person she did it to, and I should have to look at her. But it's your process, and it should look exactly like it would if she'd done this to Sal, or to Owen, or to a courier."
"It would have looked very different if she'd done it to a courier," Marcus said. He said it quietly, without heat, and then seemed to wish he hadn't.
"Yes," Nadia said. "That's sort of the point."
Gerald sat back down on the edge of his desk. He looked older than sixty-two, and then, as Nadia watched, slightly less, as if something had come off him. "You want her on leave."
"I want her treated fairly. Which means she gets to tell her side before anyone in this building decides who she is. Paid leave pending review, if that's what the policy says. Not a suspension. Not an escort out of the building. Nobody touches her badge." She heard herself, and nearly smiled, and didn't. "Someone checks her wrist. And that footage doesn't leave this room. Not to her team, not to legal unless legal needs it, not to anyone's group chat. If I hear it's been shared, I'll treat that more seriously than the shove."
"You don't want her gone," Celia said. It was half a question.
Nadia considered the window, the bus wake on the road, the crooked tie on Marcus. "I don't know her," she said. "I know about ninety seconds of her. Ninety seconds is enough to know there's a problem. It's not enough to know a person. I spent most of my twenties being judged on ninety seconds. I'm not going to start doing it on my first morning, just because this time I'm the one with the authority."
The room was quiet. Somewhere in the suite a printer started, stopped, started again.
"Brenmoor," Gerald said, finally, but weakly, like a man checking a door he already knew was locked.
"Brenmoor is a client," Nadia said. "If Brenmoor stays because of one person, that's a fragility in the account, and it's my job to fix that whether or not Vanessa is here next week. I'll want her notes. Whatever happens, we don't let a customer pay for this."
Celia closed the laptop halfway. "I'll speak to Vanessa after the all-hands," she said. "Not before. I don't want her walking into a room with two hundred people having just been put on leave. That's cruel and it's also bad practice." She glanced at Marcus. "Can you make sure the clip is saved to the restricted drive and nowhere else? And that Sal and whoever else was on the desk write statements today."
"Already doing it," Marcus said.
Gerald exhaled through his nose. "Ten o'clock, then."
"Ten o'clock," Nadia said.
As they stood, Priya hesitated by the door. "Do you want the speech notes? I printed what Gerald's assistant drafted for you. It's mostly about synergies."
"Bin it," Nadia said, and this time she did smile, a little. "I'll say something short."
The meeting room on sixteen was called Delta, for reasons lost to an earlier office manager who had named every room after a river mouth, and it had a motion sensor that turned the lights off if nobody moved for six minutes. Vanessa had found this out by sitting very still. The first time the room went dark she had flinched. Now she let it. In the dark the window was brighter, a long wet rectangle of grey city, and she could see her own outline faintly reflected over it: blazer, shoulders, the pale smear of her face.
She had come up in the freight elevator. She did not remember deciding to. She remembered standing up from the sofa, the cushions sighing back into shape behind her as if nothing had happened to them, and Marcus saying something about the first-aid room, and Sal coming around the desk far too late with his hands spread, and she remembered saying "I'm fine, I'm fine," in a voice that was not hers, a high, airy, hostess voice. Then she had walked, very carefully, in her heels, not toward the main elevators where they had gone, but toward the service corridor, and she had pressed the button for sixteen because sixteen was not where her office was.