"I mean, you're not like that with me," Theo said, kindly, as if that would help, and then, with the slightly embarrassed haste of a boy who has said more than he planned, "Anyway. Are you going to get fired?"
"I don't know," Vanessa said. "There's a meeting tomorrow morning."
"With her? The motorbike lady?"
"With her."
"Huh." He thought about that. "Are you going to say sorry?"
The question was so simple that she almost answered it without thinking, the way she'd have answered when he was seven and had pushed someone at a birthday party and she had crouched in front of him and said, What do we say? She remembered crouching. She remembered his hot furious face and how long it had taken him, and how proud she had been when he finally said it, to a small girl with frosting on her chin, without being told the words.
"I think so," she said. "I think I have to."
"Okay," Theo said. "Good." A pause. "Dad says I'm with you from Saturday. Can we get the noodle place?"
"Yes," she said. "Of course. Yes."
When he'd gone she stood in the kitchen for a long time with the phone in her hand, until the screen went dark and she could see her own face in it, small and blurred, a woman in a grey sweatshirt with no makeup on.
At eleven that night she was still awake. She had laid out clothes for the morning on the bed in the spare room, the way she always did before a big meeting, and then she had stood looking at them. The beige blazer was at the dry cleaner's; she had dropped it off on Tuesday without examining why. In its place she had put out a navy one she'd owned for years and rarely worn because it was plain, and a white shirt, and flat shoes, because her hip hurt, she told herself, because her hip hurt in heels.
She went back into the kitchen in the dark and turned on only the light over the stove. The tote was on the table where it had been since Monday. She unpacked it slowly, item by item, onto the table beside it: the laptop, the lanyard with her photo badge, the lipstick, the slide deck with her notes about Brenmoor, the reading glasses she pretended she didn't need, three receipts, a pen from a hotel in another city, a single cough drop in a twist of wax paper. When it was empty she held it open and looked into it. The lining was a darker brown than the outside. It smelled faintly of leather and her own perfume and nothing else.
She folded it in half along its natural crease and set it on the end of the counter, near the door to the hall, not on its hook.
Then she sat down at the table with the slide deck and turned it over to the blank side and picked up the hotel pen. The meeting was at nine thirty. She would need to leave by eight. She wrote, at the top of the blank page, Ms. Kerr, and looked at it, and crossed it out, and wrote Nadia, and crossed that out too, because she hadn't earned it, and sat for a long time under the small stove light with the pen above the paper, trying to find the first true sentence.
Across the city, on the nineteenth floor of Calder Point, the lights had gone to their night setting hours ago. On the desk that had been empty on Monday there was now a printed spreadsheet with a tab called carrier moods, a folded page of turnstile logs in Marcus's handwriting, and a single sheet with nine thirty written on it, and under that, in Nadia's small square capitals, one word: LISTEN.
The meeting room on nineteen was called Kestrel, because someone in a previous decade had decided that all the rooms should be named after birds and then lost interest after six of them. It had a round white table, four chairs, a whiteboard with the ghost of an old freight diagram still on it, and a window that looked straight across at the windows of the building opposite, where a man in a blue shirt was watering a plant that did not seem to want it. The rain had stopped sometime before dawn. Everything outside was the colour of wet cardboard.
Celia Moss had arrived first, at nine fifteen, and set out three glasses of water and a box of tissues, then moved the tissues to the shelf behind her, then moved them back. She had been in HR for twenty-two years and she knew the box was a message whichever way it faced. In the end she left it on the table, near the centre, where it belonged to nobody.
Nadia came in at nine twenty-five with a folder and a takeaway tea she did not intend to drink. She wore a navy jumper, dark trousers and the same white sneakers. She had thought about the jacket that morning, standing in the hallway of her flat with her keys in her hand, and had left it on the hook. It would have been a costume today, in either direction.
"She's in the lift," Celia said. "Priya walked her up from the side entrance."
"Not through the lobby."
"I thought it would be kinder."
Nadia nodded. She sat on the side of the table that faced the door, then stood and took the chair beside it instead, so that nobody would be sitting opposite anybody like a tribunal. Celia watched her do it and said nothing, but she adjusted her own chair a few inches to match.
Vanessa came in at nine thirty exactly. She was wearing a charcoal dress and a black blazer, low heels, small gold earrings, and she had her hair up in a way that must have taken twenty minutes. The tote was not with her. She carried a slim leather folio instead and held it against her stomach with both hands, the way she had held the bag on Monday, and Nadia saw her notice that and lower it to her side.
"Thank you for coming in," Celia said. "Please, sit wherever you like."
Vanessa sat. She put the folio on the table and squared it to the edge. She did not look at the tissues.
Celia went through the opening properly, because she believed that process was a kind of courtesy and that people deserved to know the shape of the room they were in. This was a formal meeting under the conduct policy. Vanessa had received the incident report, the security statement from Marcus Bell, the statement from Sal Duarte, and the CCTV footage. She was entitled to have a colleague or a representative present; she had declined. She could ask for a break at any point. Nothing said here would be used against her that was not already in the documents. Celia said all of it in a low even voice and Vanessa listened with her chin slightly raised, as if receiving a briefing from a supplier.
"I've read everything," Vanessa said when Celia finished. "And I'd like to say something first, if that's all right."
"Of course."