A young man in an all-black long-sleeve polo and dark trousers approached with the bright, brittle confidence of someone who had memorized a script and believed the script was the world. Curly red hair. White sneakers. A large square smartwatch on his wrist that flashed something Franklin did not bother to read. The young man looked Franklin up and down once — flannel, jeans, the quiet stance of a Black man who did not perform urgency for strangers — and arrived at a conclusion.
"That one isn't really for casual customers," the young man said.
Franklin turned his head slowly, as if the sentence had been a soft object tossed into the air between them.
"Why not?" he asked.
The young man's mouth did a small, practiced thing that was almost a smile and almost not. "It's professional equipment. Very expensive."
There it was. The old sorting machine, humming under fluorescent modernity. Casual. Professional. Expensive as a moral category. The assumption that price and belonging were the same language, and that Franklin Cole's body had already failed the translation.
Franklin did not argue. He stepped forward, set his fingertips lightly on the edge of the open laptop, and then — gently, without theater — closed the lid.
The click was soft. It sounded like a decision that did not need witnesses.
The young man crossed his arms. Smug settled into his shoulders like a coat he had been waiting to wear.
Franklin waited. He had found, over a long life of being underestimated in rooms with better lighting than this, that waiting was often more useful than correcting. Waiting let people finish becoming who they had chosen to be in that moment. Waiting also gave him time to notice his own pulse and decide whether he wanted to spend any of it on this boy.
He did not want to. He wanted to open the laptop again, run the checklist in his head, and leave.
He also wanted, in a quieter chamber of himself, to be seen correctly without having to arrange the seeing.
Before he could choose which want to feed, a man in a tailored navy suit walked up from the far aisle as if the floor had been built to deliver him. White shirt. Dark maroon tie. Smartphone already half-raised, then lowered when he recognized Franklin. Early forties. Caucasian. The kind of face that looked permanently mid-apology to calendars.
"Mr. Cole," the assistant said, ignoring the employee entirely, "the engineering team is waiting for your approval."
The young man's arms uncrossed so fast it looked like a fall.
Color left his face and then returned in patches. His smartwatch lit up uselessly. He opened his mouth and closed it, a fish discovering air was optional until it wasn't.
Franklin looked at the closed laptop, then at the young man, then at Adrian Moss — that was the assistant's name, Adrian, who had been with Franklin's side of the partner program for fourteen months and still texted too many exclamation points when a build was late.
"Apparently," Franklin said, mild as weather, "it's professional enough."