"At nine."
"At nine. Every day. Somebody set it up that way four years ago and nobody changed it."
"So every temp badge in this building is a decoration for the first hour of the working day."
"For the first hour of the working day," Marcus agreed. "And the cards don't have photos, because the printer in HR that does photos broke in the spring and the replacement's on a purchase order somewhere. And the lobby contract says the front-desk guard verifies visitors, but it doesn't say anything about people who've already got a badge that doesn't work. So Sal was on the phone with a courier about a pallet of printer paper, which is in his contract, and you were standing in the exact spot where a guy tailgated in three weeks ago and walked out with two laptops and a gym bag, which is in everybody's head." He let the printout fall onto his knee. "None of that's an excuse for what she did. I just want it written down somewhere that the building set it up."
"It's written down," Nadia said. "You just said it to the COO."
He looked at her. She was looking at the gates.
They sat. Tobias turned a page of something. A cleaner went past the vestibule outside with a mop bucket on wheels and the wheels ticked on the wet pavement.
"I need to tell you something," Marcus said, "and it's not going in the report, because it didn't change what I did. But I'd rather say it to you than have it sit there."
She turned her head.
"When I came out of the back corridor," he said, "before I'd heard a word, before I knew anything, I saw the two of you. And I saw the jacket, and the sneakers, and I didn't see a photo on the card." He made himself keep looking at her. "For about a second I thought, here we go, it's him again, or one of his friends. That's what I thought. About a second. Then I heard her voice and I saw her hand, and I knew who was out of line, and I moved. But the first second was the same as hers."
Nadia didn't say anything for long enough that he wondered whether he'd made a mistake.
"Thank you," she said.
"For what?"
"For telling me. Most people wouldn't." She uncrossed her leg and put both feet on the tile and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. "Can I tell you what the difference was?"
"Go ahead."
"You had the same second she did. Everybody has that second. I've had it, about other people, and I'd like to think I'm not a bigot about leather jackets." A small dry movement at the corner of her mouth. "The difference is what you did with the next second. You looked again. You heard what was happening and you went toward the person causing it, even though she was the one in the blazer. She had all of those seconds, two or three minutes of them, and she never looked again. She just kept collecting evidence for the thing she'd already decided."
Marcus turned the printout over in his hands. "In the army," he said, "they tell you the first read is usually right. Trust your gut. Get eyes on the threat."
"Did they tell you what a threat looks like?"
"They showed us pictures."
"There you go."
He laughed then, once, a short big sound that made Tobias look up from his phone. Then he sobered. "I keep thinking about the theft," he said. "I was the one who signed off on the lobby contract. I was the one who said the gates were enough. When she came to me after, Vanessa, with her memo about standards and strangers in the lounge, I thought she was overreacting, and I also thought, she's not wrong, I did miss it. So I didn't push back on the tone. On how she talked to Sal, how she talked to the contractor guys. I let it go because I felt guilty." He shrugged. "So some of yesterday's mine."
"Some of it's the building's, some of it's yours, some of it's HR's printer," Nadia said. "Most of it's hers. You can hold your share without taking hers off her. She's going to need to carry it herself or she won't learn anything." She sat back. "Here's what I want from you. Not tonight. By the end of next week. I want a proposal for the badge system. Activation at print, not at nine. Photos on every temp, I don't care if we have to buy a printer from an office supply store with my own card. A rule for the contractors about what to do when somebody's badge fails that isn't 'stare at them.' And I want you to tell me what authority your team needs that it doesn't have, because I don't think you've been given any."
"I've been given a radio," Marcus said.
"I've noticed."
He folded the printout into quarters and put it in his shirt pocket. "And her? Vanessa?"
"Thursday morning," Nadia said. "Celia and me and her. That's all I can say."
"You going to fire her?"
She looked at the empty cushion between them. The leather was smooth and unmarked. Somebody from facilities had wiped it down; he could smell the faint chemical lemon of the cleaner.
"I'm going to find out who she is," Nadia said. "Then I'm going to decide."
He nodded slowly. "Yesterday," he said, "after. The thing you did with the jacket."
She glanced at him.
"I've seen a lot of people after a fight. Most of them shake, or shout, or start explaining. You just fixed your collar and looked at her." He shook his head. "I've been trying to work out what it was."
Nadia considered the question honestly, which he would remember later, that she didn't make a joke of it.
"My dad used to do it," she said. "Before he went into a hard conversation at the depot. With the managers, about pay, about the shifts. He'd pull his work jacket straight. He said it was so his hands had something to do that wasn't a fist." She stood up and did it now, lightly, the two lapels in her two hands, one tug down. In the dim lobby it looked like nothing, a woman adjusting a coat. "It means, I'm done, and I'm still here."
She said goodnight to Tobias on her way to the garage door, by name, which Marcus noticed because he hadn't been sure she'd know it.
The formal notice came on Wednesday at two seventeen in the afternoon, in an email from Celia Moss with a PDF and a video file attached. Vanessa had spent the morning not waiting for it, which meant she had cleaned the oven, reorganized the cupboard under the sink, gone for a walk to the end of the road and back in a pair of running shoes she had last worn in March, and checked her phone something like sixty times. When it finally came she was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour earlier and the tote bag in front of her.