She stood for a while holding the card. She thought about the forty-one pages. She thought about the way Vanessa had sat on that sofa, her hands flat on the cushions on either side of her, looking up, and how her face had not been angry at all by then, only bewildered, like a woman who had stepped off a kerb that wasn't there. She thought about the meeting on the fourth day, when Vanessa had stopped defending herself in the middle of a sentence and just looked at the table for a long time, and then said, "I thought if I looked right, nobody could ever tell me I didn't belong. And then I did it to you."
Nadia put the card on the windowsill, propped against the glass, where she'd see it. She didn't answer it. She thought about answering it, and decided that some things are not the start of a conversation, just the end of one, and the right reply to them is to let them be finished. The next morning she forwarded Kofi a short note saying that yes, it was all right, and that if he needed to ask again he should, and she copied nobody else on it.
Her father called that Sunday, as he did every Sunday, from the garage behind his house where he still worked on other people's engines for cash and company. She could hear the radio behind him, a football match, and the tick of something cooling.
"You still riding that thing in this weather?" he said.
"It's not that bad."
"It's snowing."
"It was snowing. Now it's just wet."
"Wet's worse," Teddy said, with the authority of a man who had pulled a lot of motorcycles out of a lot of ditches. "Wet and cold, the tyres don't warm up. You take the bus."
"I'm not taking the bus."
"I know you're not." There was a clank, and a short pause while he did something with his free hand. "How's the job?"
She told him. She told him about the dispatch numbers and Dev and the spreadsheet, and about Brenmoor, and about Gerald taking a Friday off. She told him about the card from Vanessa, which she hadn't told anyone else. He listened without saying anything, which was what he did best.
"Good for her," he said at the end. "That's hard. Starting again. That's harder than people think."
"I know."
"You did all right," he said. Then, as if that had been too much, "Check your tyre pressure in the cold. It drops."
"I know, Dad."
"I know you know. I'm telling you anyway."
On the morning of Monday the fifteenth, she rode in early. It was barely light. The city was the colour of wet newspaper, and the streetlights were still on along the river road, and her breath fogged on the inside of her visor at every red light. She had checked her tyre pressure. It had dropped. She had fixed it, and smiled to herself in the cold garage at home, and not called her father to tell him he'd been right, because he would have been insufferable about it until Easter.
The bike ran well in the cold once it had warmed. She took the long way, past the port, because she liked to look at the cranes in the early light, standing up out of the mist like a row of patient animals. Then back along the ring road and into the city, past the cold-storage buildings with their lights already on and a forklift moving in one of the bays, though she didn't slow down to look and didn't know which one it might be.
In the garage under Calder Point she parked in her usual corner, under the flickering tube that Facilities had now promised three times to replace. She hung her helmet on the mirror. She pulled off her gloves and flexed her hands, which were stiff and red, and zipped her jacket up to the throat against the draught that came down the ramp. It was the same jacket. It had been the same jacket for nine years. There was a scuff on the left elbow from a fall on a gravel road in her late twenties, and a place on the inside of the collar where the lining had been mended twice, once by her and once, more neatly, by a tailor near her apartment who had told her she should really buy a new one and then charged her very little because he liked the old one too.
Her permanent badge was in the jacket's breast pocket. It had her photograph on it, and her title, and her name spelt correctly, with two Rs, which Priya had checked four times before it went to print and then once more after. Nadia took it out and hung it round her neck on the navy lanyard and went up the garage stairs and through the side corridor into the lobby.
It was seven twenty. The lobby was nearly empty. The overnight cleaners had been and gone and left the floor shining, the long pale tiles holding the light of the ceiling panels in soft rectangles. The black matting ran from the doors to the gates. Beyond the glass the street was grey and wet and a bus went by with its windows fogged. The air conditioning hummed at its usual pitch. The sofa sections stood along the right wall, grey leather, empty, the cushions plumped. Above the glass doors, the red EXIT sign glowed.
Sal was at the reception desk, on the early shift. He saw her and lifted one hand. She lifted one back. He was on the phone, but it was the kind of on the phone where you could tell from his face that the other person was explaining something about a delivery at length and Sal was waiting for them to stop.
There was a young woman at the gates.
She was perhaps twenty-two. She wore a dark green hoodie, zipped, with the hood down and her hair tied up in a hurried knot, and black jeans, and trainers that had once been white and now had a tidemark of slush around the soles. She had a rucksack on one shoulder and a lanyard round her neck, an Ardent lanyard, and in her hand she was holding a badge flat against the reader of the left-hand gate. The gate stayed shut. The small screen above the reader said something. The young woman read it, took the badge away, turned it over, looked at it, and pressed it back against the reader, harder, as if pressure might help. The gate stayed shut.
Nadia knew that posture. She knew the way the shoulders had come up a little and the head had gone down, and the quick glance back toward the desk and then away again, the glance of someone who doesn't want to bother anybody and doesn't want to be seen not knowing how a door works. She'd stood like that herself, at a dozen gates, at yards and depots and terminals, in the wrong clothes or the right clothes worn wrong, while somebody behind a desk decided what she was.
She walked over. Not quickly. She kept her hands where they could be seen, out of her pockets, and stopped a little more than an arm's length away, by the rail.
"Morning," she said. "It does that sometimes. Can I have a look?"