"Say it again," said Pinky, "but slower, and with the dumplings."

"There is nothing to do with the dumplings."

"There's always something to do with the dumplings." Pinky pushed the steamer basket an inch toward her across the laminate. It was twenty to eight and the Golden Wrapper had three customers: a man in a hi-vis vest reading his phone, a student asleep over a textbook, and Mr. Lau at the till, turning the pages of a racing form with his good ear to the room. "He said let her believe."

"He said, *Let Mother believe he signed it. It's kinder.*"

"Which means he knows he didn't."

"Which means he has known long enough to have a policy about it." Nia lifted a dumpling with her chopsticks and put it down again. "A man who learns something last week doesn't call it kindness. Kindness is what you call a thing you have been doing for years."

Pinky made the small, bright, murderous noise she made when a debtor said *the cheque is in the post.* "The CEO. The actual CEO. Knew, and let his own mum sit up there with her cake."

"Nobody eats the cake."

"Nia."

"I know." She did know. It sat in her chest like a swallowed coin, the picture of Hedda in the domed room saying *my son signed it,* with the whole slow certainty of a woman who has built a house on one floor and never looked down. Nia had not corrected her. She had told herself that was strategy. Tonight, over cooling pork and chive, she was less sure that strategy was the only word for it.

She took out her notebook, the paper one, and wrote a line in her small square hand. *K.H. aware of forgery. Date unknown. Source: his mouth.* Then she drew a box around it, the way she boxed anything she could not yet collect.

"You can't use it," Pinky said.

"I cannot use it. He'll say he meant something kind and vague and he will say it with his whole face. It's a lead." She tapped the box. "If he knew, someone told him, or someone showed him. Pruitt booked the entry. Vivienne, according to Pruitt, holds the key to sixty-one. Konrad is a third hand on the same rope."

"Three hands." Pinky counted them off on her bitten nails. "Pruitt, the key, the smiler. Which one do we pull first?"

"Pruitt. He's the only one standing on a floor I can reach."

"And the little thing he said on tape, about your dad never signing. Should we play that for the audit lady?"

"Not yet. Not until the hat is in more than one place."

Pinky's phone buzzed face-down against the table, a long angry rattle. She flipped it, read, and her face did a thing Nia had seen it do only twice before, once when her father's cheque bounced and once when a client's lawyer had called her *sweetheart.* "Okay. Okay okay okay. That's, um. That's your Devika. She's texting me at ten to eight at night, which is not a time people text when they want to share a recipe."

"She has your number?"

"I gave it to her the day of the conflict thing, in case you went into the lift and didn't come out. Read it."

Nia read it. *Pruitt's office just sent me a calendar invite for 8 am. Subject line is 'Personnel matter.' HR is copied. I have never in nine years had HR copied on anything.*

She was already standing.

"Where are you going?" Pinky said. "It's night. There's no plan to make at night. That's the *rule,* it's the only rule we—"

"I'm going to be at the tower at seven, and so are you. Eat that." She dropped a twenty on the table. At the till Mr. Lau did not lift his head, but his hand came up in a slow flat salute, the way an old man salutes a ship that has not yet sunk.

---

She was too late by seventy minutes.

The Control Group's open-plan on thirty-four had that smell of 7 a.m., cold toner and warm carpet, and fewer than a dozen people at their desks, none of them looking up in the particular way that people do not look up when they are very aware of one corner. The corner was Devika's. Devika's monitor was dark. Her cardigan was gone from the chair. Her photograph, a boy with a violin case taller than he was, still stood against the stand with the end of a lanyard curled in front of it, as if someone had been told to take everything and had stopped at the frame.

A young analyst named Colm, whom Nia had only ever seen eating at his desk, stood up when she approached and then did not seem to know why. "She's in nine," he said. "The small room. HR's with her. They came at six-thirty, before anyone was in. Mr. Pruitt isn't, I mean, he's not, he sent a note."

"A note."

"On behalf of the CFO's office." Colm lowered his voice until it was mostly breath. "It said *pending an independent review of access to confidential materials.* Somebody said she gave the archive file to someone external. I wouldn't know. I mean, I'm not saying she did."

"No," said Nia, "you're not."

There was a thing she did when she was angry, which Pinky called *going to church.* Her voice dropped and her words came out rounded and polite and slightly too well-spaced, like pearls being counted onto a velvet cloth. "Thank you, Colm. It was kind of you to tell me. Please don't tell anyone you did."

He nodded with relief that he had been dismissed rather than asked to take a side.

Through the glass of Meeting Room Nine she could see three people: a woman from Human Resources in a navy jacket, a man from Legal whose name she had never learned, and Devika, who sat very straight with both hands flat on the table and her mouth set in the line of a woman keeping a very small, very expensive thing from tipping. She had not cried. Her eyes were the dry red of someone who had spent the night deciding not to.

Nia did not go in. She knew what going in would cost, and who would be asked to pay it. She stood at the rail where the corridor bent and waited, and at seven forty the lift opened on thirty-four and Rafi stepped out.

He was not alone. Ciara Whelan-Osei was a pace behind him, grey-bobbed, with a face like a closed ledger. Neither of them looked at Nia, which meant both of them had seen her. Rafi's jaw had a faint blue shadow, as if he hadn't shaved because he hadn't been home; his steel watch sat face-in on his left wrist like a decision he was refusing to read.

He went into Nine. She watched through the glass, and she did not have to hear it. The HR woman stood and gave a short speech that ended with an open palm toward the door. The man from Legal slid across a single page. Devika read it with an expression of mild interest, as if it were a menu in a language she half knew. Then she picked up her handbag, because nobody had given her a box, and stood.

The protocol was that security walked a person out. Not an arrest, not an accusation, the building's polite word for it was *courtesy.* Rafi held the door for her. Ciara took the other side. Devika passed between them with her chin level and her bag clutched in front of her in both hands, and in that moment she saw Nia at the rail and she did something Nia would remember for a long time: she did not look away, and she did not look *at* her either. She looked at a place about six inches to Nia's left, as if Nia were a pillar, as if it were a kindness to leave her unrecognised.

The procession went down the length of the floor. Every head had gone back to its screen. Every back was listening.

At the lift, Rafi pressed the button with his right hand, the wrong hand, the courtesy hand. The doors opened. Devika stepped in. Before they closed Nia saw her mouth shape, without sound, a single word, and the word was not *help* and it was not *sorry.* It was *Thursday.*

The doors shut. Nia stood alone at the rail with her hands very still on the cold metal and the sound of the floor starting its day behind her. Phones rang. Somebody laughed at a joke told at the water cooler. A printer woke and began to feed a page. The building had closed over what had happened to Devika the way water does over a stone.

She thought: *Pruitt didn't act on my lie. He acted on the true thing. He fired the person who found it with me, and he did it before the audit committee could meet.* She had set the trap with her whole skill and it had sprung, and what it had caught was a woman with a mortgage and a son.

That was the entry she did not box. She wrote it in her head in a neat line anyway. *Devika Sandhu. Cost incurred. Not yet repaid.*

---

At eleven Rafi found her where she'd gone to think, which was the back stair between thirty-four and thirty-three, the one with the dead light.

He came down it slowly, a hand on the rail, and sat two steps above her like a man taking a witness stand he did not like. For a minute neither of them spoke. A fan ticked somewhere in the wall.

"I walked her out," he said at last.

"I watched."

"The instruction came from the CFO's office, countersigned by HR and approved by Legal. Vivienne's deputy, not Vivienne. I couldn't refuse it. I'm not allowed to refuse a personnel escort. If I had, they'd have sent someone who would do it with a hand on her arm." He turned the watch on his wrist a quarter turn and back. "I want you to know I said nothing to her. I didn't say *sorry* because it would have been an insult. But I held the lift."

"You pressed the button with the wrong hand."

His head came up. "You noticed that."

"It was the only part of the morning that looked like it cost you."

He let that sit. It was an unfair thing to say and a true one, and they both knew it, and his face did something small and unguarded and was shut again before it could finish. "Nia. The note says she passed archive material to a person outside the company. That's a firing offence. It also says the *person* may be the contractor who filed the log request for 2008-BW-1." He waited. "That's you. In writing. In a file that went to Hedda's office at nine."

"I know."

"They haven't named you yet. They've left the sentence unfinished. I've been doing this a long time and an unfinished sentence is the loudest kind." He looked down the dark stairwell, then back. "I'd like to know who in this building wanted her to see *me* do it."

"Why would anyone want that?"

"Because I'm the person she'd have trusted if she hadn't gone to you first. Because now she can't." His voice was very even. "Someone is arranging who we can and can't turn to, and doing it neatly, one door at a time."

Nia looked at her hands. They were Linnea's mother's hands, according to nobody yet, and they were steady, and she hated that they were steady. "She had a son with a violin," she said, and it came out smaller than she had planned.

Rafi did not say *it's not your fault.* She would have walked out of the stairwell if he had. He said, "Then we make it cost them more than it cost her," and held out a hand, and she did not take it, and he left it there anyway, open between them in the dim, as if it were an invoice he was happy to leave unpaid.

She took it on the count of five. His palm was warm and dry and callused along the side, the writing hand of a left-handed man.

Upstairs, in the lobby of her own phone, a message had come in from a number she did not know. Just three words, from a hidden sender, in the same blunt grammar as the one that had told Devika where to look.

*Now you are even.*

She was not sure if it was a taunt or a bill.