"You are four minutes early," said Hedda Halvard, "which is a form of rudeness. Sit."

The domed room had the late-afternoon light in it, a flat October gold that came through the high glass and lay across the gate-legged table like something spilled. Mrs. Pellegrino had already cut the lemon cake. One slice, on a plate, with a fork set parallel to the edge, and nothing on the other plate at all. The old maid caught Nia's eye on her way out and, quite deliberately, closed one of her own.

Nia sat. Hedda did not pour. She sat with both hands on the head of the ebony cane, and the cane upright between her knees, and watched Nia the way she might have watched a clock she suspected of running slow.

"You have had a busy morning," Hedda said.

"The committee was brief."

"Marguerite telephoned me at noon. She is still very good at sounding as if she has not telephoned in anger." The corner of the old mouth moved. "She says you delivered a document in person, rather than through the secretary. She says it was well done. She does not say it often."

"Ms. Sandhu's document. I only carried it."

"Quite." The word came down like a coin on a counter. "You are about to ask me about my signature on a certain paper. You will do it politely, because Marguerite will have told you to. I would prefer that you simply ask."

It was the second time in a month the woman had taken a question off Nia's tongue, and she felt, again, the odd chill of being read by someone who had once read her in a nursery. She laid her hands flat on her knees.

"Did you read it before you signed?"

"I read the first line and the last. I read the block with the name." Hedda's voice had not altered by a hair. "That is how Vivienne's papers arrive. A cover note, three lines, a tab where I am to sign. She has sent me papers in that form for nineteen years and I have never once been sorry."

"The approval is dated ten to six in the morning."

"I am awake at five. Mrs. Pellegrino lays out the day's folders with the tea. There was one marked URGENT in Vivienne's hand. It said that a member of the Control Group had been found passing archive material to a person outside the company, and that the person was a risk to the flotation. It said that the usual route, to wait for Marguerite, would take until Thursday, and that a delay would put the prospectus in danger." She inclined her head a fraction. "I signed. I would, I think, sign again. A house that cannot move before breakfast is not a house."

"Ms. Sandhu has a son," Nia said, "who plays the violin."

The eyes did not flicker. But something at the base of the old throat tightened, one thin cord under the skin, and was let go.

"I know she has," Hedda said. "I read the file before I signed. Boys with violins are not rare. They are, however, extremely useful as a means of ensuring that loyal women do not make fools of themselves."

It took Nia a full second to understand it. Then she did, and it was worse than if Hedda had denied it. The old woman *knew.* She had looked at the page and seen what it did and signed it anyway, not out of ignorance but out of an obscene tidiness of mind, a conviction that cruelty was a form of upkeep.

"That is a very hard sentence," said Nia, at the volume of a person reading a will.

"It is a true one. I am eighty next spring, Ms. Boateng. I have buried a husband and two sons and I do not propose to bury the company. If one woman's mortgage is the price of keeping a roof over four thousand people, then I will pay it from my own account, and I shall do so before the end of the month, quietly, and she will never know whose it was." The cane tapped once. "You look as if you disapprove."

"I don't have a view."

"No one has *ever* been without a view in this room. It is not a safe habit." But the corner of the mouth twitched again, in something that was almost approval and almost something Nia could not name. "You have a very good face for hiding them. Your mother must have had it also."

The air in the room went away.

Nia did not move. She did not breathe in. She had been trained, as a child, in the art of sitting very still while adults decided whether to hit one of their own, and the skill had come back to her now whole and unasked, a cold hard reflex like a hand flat on a stove.

"I'm sorry?"

"Your mother. Ines Boateng. Cleaner, you said, and then alterations." Hedda's gaze did not leave her. "Women who work with their hands and answer to other people learn to hold the face still. It is not a criticism. I was raised by one." She lifted the cane an inch and set it down. "I merely observe a family resemblance. It is the sort of thing one notices at my age. You will forgive an old woman her sentiment."

"Of course."

Hedda let her sit in it. Then she said, quite lightly, "There is another matter. I took the liberty of asking Mr. Mizrahi-Dube to look into the Sandhu business at its edges. Not the woman. The *history.* She is not, I find, the first person in the Control Group to ask questions about that old box. There was a man in 2019. Ito."

The name went through Nia like a wire.

"He is employed by a baking concern now, in Etobicoke. Mr. Pruitt mentioned his name to me in a different connection some weeks ago. I asked Rafi to see whether Mr. Ito had been in contact with anyone at Halvard." The old head tilted. "He has been at the man's place of work since Tuesday. I thought you should know. I thought you ought to hear it from me and not from a corridor."

Rafi. A left-handed man with a steel watch and a black book, standing at a loading dock, asking a night manager about honey.

It had not been his idea. It had been an order. And he had said to her on the dark stair on Wednesday morning, *Someone is arranging who we can and can't turn to,* and had looked her in the eye while he said it, with the same kettle-patient face, and had not told her that on Tuesday he had already started working for the person who was doing the arranging.

"Thank you," said Nia. "For telling me."

"It is not kindness. It is housekeeping." Hedda pushed the plate with the lemon cake an inch across the table. It stopped halfway, at the exact centre. "You may have it, if you want. No one else ever does."

"No, thank you."

"Noted." The old woman folded her hands. "That is all. Next Thursday, Ms. Boateng. Four o'clock. Do not be early."

---

He was waiting at the lift on sixty-one.

Of all the floors in that building to be standing on, he had chosen the one where a single dot on the Wall never moved. Nia understood the choice an instant later. It was the only landing where nothing could be overheard from either direction, because Vivienne's door had no reader and no camera, and if anyone had wanted to listen on that landing they would have had to stand in plain sight.

He had his back to the glass. In the thin light his shadow lay along the floor like a ruled line.

"She told you," he said.

"She told me."

"I was going to." He took a step toward her and stopped, and she saw him arrange the next sentence and discard it and arrange another. "Tuesday morning. She called me at six. Directly. Not through Vivienne. She asked me to establish whether a former employee had any ties to the Sandhu matter, and I said yes, ma'am, because a woman who pays for my mother's bed asks for something and the answer is yes. I didn't know it was Ito until I got the name. I didn't know what he would mean to you until the night you called me from the streetcar and I heard you breathing."

"The streetcar."

"Your phone was on the open mic. Nia, you called me by accident, you were holding it against your ear with the wrong thumb." His voice cracked on the last word, and he looked as startled as she did. "I heard. All of it. The whole call. I wasn't listening on purpose, but I was listening."

She felt the floor go out from under the sentence.

"So you know where he'll meet me."

"No. He didn't say. But I know that he will, and that he asked you to come alone, and that he is afraid of a man with a watch face turned in. He is afraid of me." Rafi lifted his left wrist and looked at the steel without seeing it. "I should stop wearing it that way."

"It isn't the watch."

"No."

They stood in the cold white landing, with the door that had no reader between them and Vivienne Okoro-Lasch's silence. And Nia, who kept every account and knew to the cent what she was owed, could not for her life work out what she owed him, or what he owed her, or which of them had just been paid.

"I'm not going to ask you to stop," she said at last. "I'm going to ask you what you'll tell her when she asks where he goes next."

Rafi did not answer for a long time.

"I'd tell her I lost him," he said. "I've never lied to her before. I'd like very much to be good at it."