She walked back toward her office, and Thomas watched her go with the particular attention of someone who had learned to read a situation from its edges. The limp she was suppressing was slight, barely visible, the kind of thing you'd only catch if you were looking for it. He had been looking for it for five weeks. He finished his route and clocked out just after 6.
On the drive home, he thought about Marcus Hale and the way the man sat in a room like he was already imagining what it would look like rearranged. He thought about Ron Bridges and his flat, watchful eyes. He thought about Evelyn standing at the head of that table with her hand pressed flat against the surface, holding herself upright through something that had no good name in a boardroom context. Maya was awake when he got home, sitting at the kitchen table in her pajamas eating cereal, her new inhaler on the table beside the bowl where she could reach it easily.
She looked up when Thomas came in and said without preamble, Gerald had a bad night. Thomas sat down across from her and looked at the rabbit, which was propped against the fruit bowl with its one remaining eye pointed at the ceiling. "What happened?" "He could not breathe," Maya said seriously. "So I gave him some of my old inhaler, the empty one." Thomas looked at his daughter, seven years old, missing her left front tooth, hair in two uneven braids she had done herself because she had decided she was old enough and felt the weight he always carried settle into something quieter, something bearable. "That is good thinking," he said.
Maya nodded, satisfied, and went back to her cereal. Thomas got up and put the kettle on and stood at the kitchen window while the water heated, looking out at the alley behind their building, where the morning light was just starting to collect in the corners. Somewhere across town, in a building that cost more to maintain for a year than his entire block was worth, a woman was sitting at her desk already, working. Carrying something enormous, with no one to help her carry it, or at least no one until five weeks ago.
He didn’t know yet that Marcus Hale had already spoken to a man named Derek Walsh, a security guard on the overnight rotation, and that Derek had been given a specific instruction, "Watch the janitor on the audit assignment document, anything that looks unusual, and report back without involving building management." He didn’t know that Derek had already made two notes in a private log, and that one of them included Thomas’s name. He poured his coffee and sat back down across from Maya, and she told him about a dream she'd had about a dog that could speak French. And he listened, and for a little while, the 50th floor was very far away.
The Apex Holdings annual gala was held on the first Friday of November in the grand ballroom of a hotel four blocks from the main tower. 300 guests, shareholders, board members, technology partners, and a carefully selected group of financial journalists filled the room in dark suits and evening gowns, moving between cocktail tables while a string quartet played in the corner. The whole event had the quality of a performance, which was exactly what it was, a yearly demonstration that Apex Holdings was stable, profitable, and led by someone whose judgment could be trusted with $9 billion of other people’s money. Thomas had been inside the ballroom since 5:00 in the afternoon helping coordinate the logistics set up under the cover of the catering and facilities team that Evelyn’s office had contracted for the event. His position for the evening was in the far right corner of the room near the service entrance close enough to the main floor to move quickly if needed far enough from the central tables to remain unremarkable.