She had put the tote on the table on Monday night when she got home, because she couldn't think where else to put it. It usually lived on a hook inside the hall closet, on its own hook, away from the coats. On Monday she had come in and stood in the hall and not been able to lift her arm to the hook, and so she had carried it into the kitchen and set it on the table and sat down across from it, and it had been there ever since. She had not unpacked it. Her work laptop was still inside, which she was not supposed to use while on leave, and her lanyard, and a lipstick, and a folded Brenmoor slide deck with her handwriting in the margins. One of the leather handles had a scuff on it now, a pale abrasion an inch long where it must have caught on the sofa frame. She kept looking at the scuff. She had owned the bag for six years and there had never been a mark on it.
Her wrist hurt when she turned it a certain way. Her left hip had a bruise the colour of a plum that she'd found in the shower on Tuesday and stared at for a long time.
The PDF was two pages. It confirmed that she remained on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of a review into an incident in the ground-floor lobby of Calder Point at approximately 8:52 a.m. on Monday 27 October. It invited her to attend a meeting at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday 30 October on the nineteenth floor with Celia Moss, Director of People, and Nadia Kerr, Chief Operating Officer. It said she was entitled to bring a colleague with her. It said that in accordance with the company's policy on fair process, a copy of the relevant CCTV footage was attached so that she could review it before the meeting, and that the footage was confidential and must not be shared. It said she could call Celia with any questions.
Vanessa read it twice. Then she looked at the video file for a while, at the little icon and the name, LOBBY_CAM02_0849-0856.mp4, as if it were a letter in someone else's handwriting.
She had already told the story to herself so many times since Monday that it had worn smooth. She had told it to Lena on Monday in the meeting room on sixteen, and to Lena again on the phone Monday night, and to her sister in a long text on Tuesday that her sister had answered with oh Ness and then nothing. In the story there was a stranger in the lounge, in the place where the theft had happened, with a fake-looking badge and an attitude, and Vanessa had done what anybody responsible would have done, which was ask. The stranger had been evasive. The stranger had been rude. Vanessa had perhaps been firm, and the stranger had perhaps been provoked, and then everything had gone very fast, and the stranger had shoved her. Shoved her onto a sofa. In front of people. In the story it was the shove that mattered.
She opened the file.
The camera was above the reception desk, and it was a wide lens, so the lobby looked bigger than it was and slightly curved, as though the floor were the top of a gently swelling wave. There was no sound. The time code ran white in the top corner. For a few seconds it was only the room: the pale tiles with the ceiling lights lying in them like dropped coins, the dark rectangle of the vestibule and the red smudge of the EXIT sign, the long row of windows on the right and the grey sofas under them. Sal's elbow and the back of his head at the bottom of the frame, the phone at his ear.
A woman in a leather jacket stood near the sofas. She stood with her weight even and her hands loose at her sides, and she was looking around the room, at the gates, at the ceiling, at the windows. She looked at her phone briefly and put it away. She looked, Vanessa thought, like someone waiting for someone. She did not look like anything else. Vanessa watched for the thing she had seen on Monday, the furtiveness, the casing of the room, the look of someone measuring the distance to the door, and it was not there. It was a woman standing in a lobby.
Then a figure in beige came in through the glass doors at the top of the frame.
Vanessa had not seen herself walk in a long time, maybe ever. She knew how she looked in a mirror, face-on, posed, checking. She had never seen the back of her own neck as she crossed a room, or the way her shoulders went up and forward when she was angry, so that she seemed to be walking into a wind. The figure in beige came in fast and then slowed, and changed course, and approached the woman by the sofa at an angle, the way you'd approach a dog you weren't sure of. It stopped. It said something. The woman in the jacket turned her head and answered, briefly, and turned her head back.
The figure in beige moved closer.
Vanessa watched it happen with no sound, and without sound it was much worse. She could not hear her own reasonable voice. She could not hear any of the words she had been sure were polite, or the calm questions she'd thought she had asked. All she could see was what her body had done, and what her body had done was advance. Every exchange, the figure in beige took a step and the woman in the jacket did not. A step, and a step. The woman in the jacket shifted once, slightly back, and the beige figure filled the space she'd left. There was a moment, about a minute in by the time code, when the woman in the jacket glanced over at the reception desk, toward Sal, a quick hopeful look, and Vanessa had not seen that look on Monday at all. She had been standing right in front of it and had not seen it.
Then the beige figure leaned in and put its hand out and down, toward the badge, toward the woman's chest. Its head went forward on its neck like a goose's.
She had not known her face could look like that. Even at this distance, even blurred by the compression, she could see it, the jaw pushed out, the mouth wide. It was the face of a woman at a car park barrier screaming at a machine. It was the face of someone you would cross the street to avoid.
The woman in the jacket knocked the hand away and stepped back. Marcus came in from the bottom of the frame with his arms out. The woman in the jacket turned sideways, and her shoulders dropped, and she said something short. And then the beige figure went around Marcus. Not toward the door. Toward the woman. It was so quick on the screen, a lurch, the tote swinging on its straps, and Vanessa's memory of that second had been that she had been pushed, that she had stepped forward and been pushed, but that was not what the camera saw. The camera saw a woman throw herself at another woman who had already turned away, and the other woman get an arm up in time, and twist, and push, and the first woman go backward over the edge of the sofa as if somebody had pulled a rug.