He had said one thing to her about October, in the second week of December, when they were alone in his office going through next year's budget. He had put down his pen and said, "I was worried about the optics. That first morning. I said that to you. I've thought about it since. The optics turned out to be that you checked if she was hurt." He picked his pen back up. "I'm too old to be learning things like that." Nadia said nobody was too old, and he said, "Watch me," and they went back to the budget.
The intern's name was Hattie Linwood and she had started on the first of December in the data team, which meant she sat in the corner of fifteen next to Owen Tate and absorbed, in her first week, roughly half of everything he knew. Owen was surprised by how much that was. Six weeks ago he had been the most junior person on the floor. Now there was someone more junior, and she asked him things, and he discovered that he had answers.
She asked him about the lobby on her fourth day. They were in the kitchen on fifteen, waiting for the kettle, which was older than both of them and took four minutes. Hattie was looking at the laminated card behind her badge.
"Can I ask something weird," she said.
"Sure."
"Is it true the COO threw someone over a sofa? On her first day?"
Owen had heard this version before. He had heard several. In the first week after it happened, the story had travelled around Calder Point and out into the city on its own legs, and each time it came back it had grown. She'd judo-thrown her. She'd put her through the window. She'd been a cage fighter. She'd been a spy. A friend of Owen's who worked at a bank two blocks away had texted him to ask if it was true that the new COO at Ardent had a criminal record for assault, and Owen had spent forty minutes that evening composing a reply and then deleted it, because nothing he wrote sounded like what had happened.
He thought about it now, with the kettle beginning its long climb toward a boil.
"No," he said. "She didn't throw anybody. I was there. I was holding the door for Priya. I saw the whole end of it."
Hattie looked at him with the frank interest of someone who has been given a rumour and now has a primary source.
"There was a woman who worked here," Owen said. "A senior person. She didn't know who Nadia was. Nadia had a temp badge with no photo on it because hers got printed wrong, and the gates were broken, so she was standing in the lobby waiting. The woman thought she looked like she didn't belong, I guess. Because of the jacket, or the shoes, or I don't know. There'd been a theft. Everyone was on edge. She went up and started asking her questions and then she grabbed for her badge."
"Grabbed it?"
"Reached for it. Nadia knocked her hand away and said she worked there. Marcus, the security guy, came running in and got between them. And then the other woman went for her again. Like, lunged. And Nadia just," he raised his forearm, turned slightly, and made a short, small pushing motion at the air, "like that. That's all. The woman went backward and sat down on the sofa. Hard. Nobody got hurt."
"That's it?"
"That's it. The whole thing was about ten seconds." He hesitated. "Then she didn't say anything for a second. She just sort of fixed her jacket. And it was really quiet. And then Priya opened the door and said her name, and everybody found out who she was."
Hattie was quiet for a moment. The kettle clicked off.
"What happened to the other woman?"
"She left. She resigned. She said sorry first, though. To a lot of people. Even to Sal at the front desk." He poured water into two mugs. "Nadia checked if she was hurt. Right after. Offered her a hand to get up. The woman didn't take it, but she offered."
"Did you film it?"
"No." He said it quickly, and then said it again more slowly, because it was the part he was proudest of and least sure how to explain. "I got my phone out. I almost did. And then I didn't. I don't really know why. It felt like it would be the worst thing I could do to both of them." He handed her a mug. "There's a camera above reception anyway. HR has the footage. It doesn't have sound. If you ever hear anyone say what anybody said, they're making it up, unless they were me or Priya or Marcus."
Hattie wrapped both hands around the mug.
"So why does everyone say she threw her over the sofa?"
Owen thought about that. "Because it's a better story," he said. "Except it isn't, really. The real one's better. It's just harder to tell."
He went back to his desk and found that he was a little shaky, the way he sometimes was after a presentation, and he sat for a while without opening anything, looking out at the slush on the roofs. Then Hattie came over with a question about a pivot table, and he answered it, and the morning went on.
The card came in the second week of December, in a small cream envelope with a stamp that had a robin on it. It was addressed to Nadia Kerr, Chief Operating Officer, Ardent Freight Systems, Floor 19, in blue ink, in handwriting that slanted forward as if it were in a hurry and was trying not to be. The mail room put it in her tray with the vendor invoices and a catalogue for warehouse shelving.
Nadia opened it standing up, at her window, at the end of a long Thursday. It was a plain card. On the front was a line drawing of a harbour in winter, a few boats, a crane. Inside, there were three lines.
New job. Small company, cold-chain storage out by the ring road. Nobody here knows me, so I'm starting from nothing, which I find I needed. Brenmoor's Kofi emailed me a question last week and I answered it. I hope that was all right. V.
That was all. No return address, though the postmark said the industrial district by the old port, which Nadia knew well. She'd spent four years running a yard out there. She knew the cold-storage firms along the ring road, low white buildings with loading bays like rows of teeth, frost on the inside of the doors in August. Hard places. Honest places, mostly. You could not talk your way past a pallet of fish that had been left too long at the wrong temperature. Either you'd done the work or you hadn't.