The sixty-second floor of Halvard Tower did not look like the rest of it.

Nia had expected more glass. Instead the lift opened on a hall with a floor of dark herringbone wood, a runner the colour of old wine, and a pair of double doors painted a green so deep it was nearly black. The sound of the building thinned and stopped. It was like stepping from a ship into someone's house.

"Mrs. Halvard keeps the top floor for herself," said Rafi, at her elbow. He had met her in the lobby at 5:40 and said nothing in the lift except, "Don't say more than you're asked." His jaw was tight, and he stood a little too straight. "There's no camera on this side of the door. There's only me, in the corridor, and Mrs. Halvard's maid, who is eighty."

"Is she dangerous?"

"She's the only person I fear." He said it quite seriously. "Go in."

The doors opened without being touched. Behind them stood a very small, very old woman in a black dress and a white apron, with arms like knotted string and a face that had settled, over eighty years, into permanent suspicion.

"Mrs. Pellegrino," said Rafi.

"Rafael." She looked Nia up and down in one sweep, shoes to hair, and sniffed. "Thin. Come in. Don't touch the cake. She'll know." She took Nia's coat with a force that suggested it had insulted her, and walked off, muttering in Italian.

"She likes you," said Rafi, very low.

"How can you tell?"

"She would have said something worse in English."

He stayed in the corridor. The doors swung to behind her.

A dome. That was the first thing: a circular room with a ceiling like the inside of an egg, painted the pale blue of a winter morning and webbed with fine gold lines that she realised, slowly, were constellations. Under it a gate-legged table, laid for two. China so thin it glowed. A silver teapot. On a plate in the middle, a lemon cake, perfect, untouched, with a single slice already cut and not removed, as if it had been waiting for years for someone to take it.

And at the table, upright in a chair with a high back, with an ebony cane hooked over one arm, sat Hedda Halvard.

She was smaller than the cameras made her. That surprised Nia more than anything. In every photograph she had loomed, grey and straight, a monument. In the flesh she was a slight old woman with a white cloud of pinned hair, a high-collared dress the colour of slate, and hands folded in her lap, thin and veined and as still as paper. The eyes were pale. They didn't move. They didn't need to.

*Grandmother.* The word had no business in Nia's head. It tried to climb out of her throat and she pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth until it stopped.

"Ms. Boateng," said Hedda. "Sit."

Her voice was dry and low, exact as a ruler. It did not rise at the end. Nia sat.

"Tea?"

"Thank you."

Hedda poured. Her hand did not shake at all. She passed the cup across the cloth as one passes a document, and then she lifted a thin folder from beside her plate, opened it, and began to read.

The silence went on. Nia drank her tea. It was excellent. It tasted of smoke and bergamot, and of afternoons she could almost remember, with the light coming through net curtains on a hard-backed chair, and a hand putting a sugar lump into her cup when no one was looking. She put the cup down very carefully.

The pages turned. Hedda read slowly, from the top of each sheet to the bottom, as though every line might be a trap. Education. Employment. Addresses. She came to the last page and her finger paused.

"Your mother," she said.

"Ines Boateng."

"Quite." The finger moved a fraction, tapping a name. Not a pause that anyone watching would have called a pause. The finger, the slightest tap. A heartbeat. "And what does she do?"

"She has an alterations shop. In Scarborough."

"And before that?"

"Cleaning. Offices, mostly. Some private houses."

"For whom?"

"Whoever paid," said Nia. "She wasn't particular."

"Everyone is particular." Hedda closed the folder. "It is a question of whether they will say so." She laid her hands on top of it. Her eyes, the pale unfocused blue of old china, rested on Nia's face. They did not search. They simply rested, like a weight on a scale. "You have Ghanaian parentage?"

"My mother is from Kumasi."

"And your father?"

"I didn't know him."

"A pity." Said without a trace of pity. "A child should know where she begins."

It was all Nia could do to sit still. The air in the dome was warm, and smelled of lemons and old books. She felt that if she moved, the whole thing, the egg, the stars, the cake, would crack open from top to bottom.

"Do you know why I asked you here?" said Hedda.

"I assume because of the recusal."

"I approved it." No inflection. "Marguerite is an old friend and a good lawyer. She has never been wrong about the form of a thing. I'd have done the same in her place." She turned her cup a quarter turn on its saucer. "No. I asked you here because for fourteen days a woman I have never met has been making a great deal of noise in my building. A viral video. A demand letter. A box in the basement. A lunch at the Albion Club, which I understand was not fruitful."

Nia kept her face quite blank, though her blood was cold. "You're well informed."

"I am eighty next April, Ms. Boateng. It is the only compensation." Hedda sipped. "I do not mind noise. Noise is how one learns who is in the room. What I mind is noise about a particular thing. Brightwater is a particular thing. It was done, eighteen years ago, for reasons that seemed sound at the time. By people who thought they were acting for the family. By me, in part. I do not like to be reminded of it by an invoice."

*By me, in part.* She said it so calmly. She might have been explaining a change in the weather.

"I'm only doing what I was engaged to do," said Nia.

"Yes. That is what is so tiresome about you." She put down the cup. "You are neither dishonest nor foolish. One cannot simply remove you. And so I have decided, instead, to keep you where I can see you." A thin movement of the lips, perhaps a smile. "You will report to me. Thursdays at four. In person. In this room. You will tell me what you have found, and what you intend, and I will tell you whether it is wise."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you will find that Kestrel Recovery's receivables from Halvard Group have been, regrettably, queried. By a very large firm, with a very large accounting department. And Ms. Raman will be required to go to the trouble of explaining each and every dumpling." Hedda lifted a hand. "I do not threaten. I merely forecast."

The tea in Nia's stomach was a hard little stone. She thought of Pinky, in Golden Wrapper, with her plum hair and her gel pens and her entire life in a firm of three desks. She said, evenly, "Thursdays at four."

"Quite."

"Is there anything else?"

"One thing." Hedda reached across the table. Nia did not flinch. The old woman took the teaspoon from the saucer in front of her, looked at it for a moment as though it held a tiny reflection of something else, and laid it down again. "You may take a slice of the cake."

"I'm not hungry."

"Nobody ever is," said Hedda Halvard. "It is lemon. It was a favourite of someone's. I have it made every week, and I cut one slice, and in the evening I give the rest to the staff." She did not look at the plate. "Go."

---

Nia stood in the corridor outside the green doors, with her back against the wall and her eyes shut. She could hear her own breathing. It sounded like someone else's.

*It was a favourite of someone's.*

She was not crying. She had a rule about that.

The doors were not quite closed. A line of lamplight lay across the herringbone, and through it, low and clear, came the voice of the woman she had just left.

"Mr. Mizrahi-Dube."

"Ma'am."

Rafi had gone in as she came out. She hadn't seen him do it. She stood very still, without moving her feet.

"You have the file on the contractor. You read it before it came to me."

"Yes, ma'am."

"The mother's name. Boateng. You had it before today?"

A pause. "Yes, ma'am."

"Does the archive hold anything else under that name?"

It was a fair, polite, clear question, the question of an employer to an employee about a routine matter. In the quiet of the sixty-second floor, with her heart banging against her ribs, Nia heard Rafi draw a breath. She heard the whole of his silence, the weight of it, a man deciding what he is.

She heard him say it.

"No, ma'am."

"You are certain."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Quite," said Hedda Halvard. "Thank you."

Nia moved away from the wall. She walked along the red runner and pressed the button for the lift and did not look back. Behind her the doors stayed open, a thin white seam of light, and she knew without needing to see it that Rafael Mizrahi-Dube was standing in the lamplight with his hands at his sides, having told the one lie he had never told, to the one woman he owed everything.

For her.

She stepped into the lift and put her forehead against the steel, and for the first time since she had been eleven years old, she felt something shift in her chest that was not a plan.

It had a name. She refused to say it. She stood with the cold steel against her forehead, watching the numbers fall, and thought, with a clarity that frightened her more than any of Hedda's forecasts: that he had a mother in a care home in Mississauga whose bed was paid for by the woman he had just lied to, and that he had done it anyway, in four syllables, without being asked, and that nobody, in eighteen years, had ever spent so much for her without sending a bill.