She watched herself land. Her legs went up a little. The bag slid off the cushion and lay against the base of the sofa with its handles splayed.
And then the woman in the jacket stood there and pulled her jacket straight, once, and looked down at the beige figure on the sofa, and nobody moved, and the time code kept counting in its corner, white numbers going up, eight fifty-two and forty seconds, forty-one, forty-two. Through the glass at the top of the frame two small shapes stood in the vestibule with their hands at their sides. One of them was holding two cups.
Vanessa stopped the video. Then she dragged it back to the start and watched it again, and then again, the third time with the sound on her laptop turned all the way up, as if there might be something there after all, some audio that would put her own voice back and make it all reasonable. There was only the faint hiss of the file.
The fourth time she didn't watch the woman in the jacket at all. She watched Sal. Sal on the phone, talking to someone about something, his elbow on the desk, and at the moment she reached for the badge he half-turned his head, and then he looked back down at his notepad, because he didn't want to get involved, because she had spoken to him in a particular way in the weeks after the theft, in a voice she had thought of as setting standards, and he had learned. She watched him learn it on the screen in about half a second.
She closed the laptop. The kitchen was very quiet. Outside, a neighbour's car door went, and a child said something in a high, complaining voice and was answered in a low one.
The tote sat on the table where it had sat for two days. In the grey afternoon light from the window over the sink the monogram looked like what it was, a pattern printed on canvas, repeated, repeated. She had paid more for it than her mother had paid for her first car. She had bought it on a Saturday in a shop where a young man in gloves handed it to her as if it were a newborn, and she had walked out onto the street feeling for the first time in her life that nobody would ever again look at her and wonder whether she was supposed to be there.
That was what she had been checking for, on Monday. She understood that now with a slow sick clarity, sitting at the table. She had looked at the woman in the leather jacket and the white sneakers and the badge with no face on it, and she had been checking whether the woman was supposed to be there, because that was the question she had spent her whole life afraid someone would ask about her.
She did not cry. She sat with her hand flat on the table near the scuffed handle, not quite touching it, until the light at the window went from grey to darker grey.
Theo called at a quarter past eight. He did not call often; he was sixteen and lived at his father's on weeks that ended in odd numbers, which this one did, and when he wanted something he texted. So when the phone lit up with his name, and the photo she'd taken of him at the lake two summers ago with his hair still long, her heart did a thing it hadn't done since he was small and running toward roads.
"Hey," he said. "Are you okay?"
"Of course I'm okay. Why?"
"Dad said you weren't at work. He said Lena called him. Or he called Lena. Something." A pause, and the sound of a door closing, and the background noise dropping away: he'd gone into his room. "He said there was a thing."
Vanessa closed her eyes. Of course Lena had called Rob; they'd stayed friends after the divorce, in that way that had seemed civilized at the time. Of course Rob had said something in front of Theo. Of course.
"There was a thing at work," she said. "It's fine. It's being sorted out. I'm just home for a few days while they review it."
"What kind of thing?"
She could have said a disagreement. She could have said a misunderstanding, which had been the word in her head since Monday, the word she'd planned to use on Thursday. She opened her mouth to say it.
"I made a mistake," she said instead, and the sentence surprised her so much she stopped.
Theo waited. He was good at waiting, better than she was; he'd got that from his father.
"There was a woman in the lobby," Vanessa said, "and I thought she didn't work there. We'd had a theft, you remember, I told you about the laptops. And she didn't look like she worked there, and I. I went up to her and I was quite aggressive about it, and it turned out she's the new COO. She's my boss's boss. And it got physical, a bit, and I ended up on a sofa." She heard herself make a sound that might have been a laugh. "Nobody's hurt. I've got a bruise. It's not a big drama. It's just embarrassing."
There was a long pause on the line. She could hear him breathing, and very faintly his music from a speaker somewhere in his room, something with a heavy, slow bass.
"What did she look like?" Theo asked.
"What?"
"You said she didn't look like she worked there. What did she look like?"
Vanessa looked at the tote. "A leather jacket," she said. "Jeans. Sneakers. She rides a motorbike, apparently."
"So, like, normal."
"Theo."
"No, I'm just asking." He wasn't being cruel. That was the worst of it; she could hear that he wasn't. He was sixteen and he was thinking it through out loud in the plain way he did everything. "That's kind of what you do, though. Like, with people."
"What do you mean?"
"Like with Jonah's mom." Jonah was a friend from his old school; his mother drove a delivery van and came to pick him up in her uniform. "At the thing, the concert. You asked her if she was staff. And with my friends, when they come over. You do this thing where you look at their shoes." He said it the way he'd say it was raining. "Everybody notices, Mom. Jonah asked me once if you didn't like him. I said you were just like that."
She had nothing to say. She stood up from the table, she didn't know why, and stood in the middle of the kitchen with the phone at her ear.
"Just like that," she repeated.