The cake came from the Kroger on Polaris Parkway, a full sheet, white buttercream with a border of piped blue shells, and someone in the bakery had written across it in a looping gel script: SHE SAID YES!!! Three exclamation points. Under the words was a frosting diamond the size of a man's palm, outlined in silver dragées that would crack a filling if you weren't careful. Dwayne Dobbins carried it in from the elevator bank at ten minutes to three on a Friday in October, holding it out in front of him like a man carrying a sleeping child through a crowd, and everyone on the fifth floor of Brecken Benefits Group stood up from their desks to look at it.
I was on the fifth floor because Winona had sent me up with a stack of vendor W-9s for the sales coordinators to chase, and I had stayed because Winona had told me to stay. "You never come to anything," she had said that morning, peering at me over the reading glasses she wore on a beaded chain. "Eleven years. Go eat a piece of cake. It's free sugar, Etta. Nobody will bite you."
So I stood near the copier alcove with my tote bag over my shoulder and the W-9s delivered and my hands folded in front of me, and I watched them set up.
I want to describe it exactly, because afterward people described it every which way, and the versions got bigger and meaner and more like television each time they were told. The fifth floor at Brecken is an open plan of gray fabric cubicles with low walls, laid out in a grid around a central island of printers and a kitchenette with a long counter of fake butcher block. The windows face west, over the parking lot and the hotel and the line of the interstate beyond, and at three o'clock in October the light comes in low and gold and turns all the monitor screens into blank mirrors. Somebody had tied silver and white balloons to the backs of the chairs in the sales pod. Somebody else had taped a paper banner across the glass wall of the big conference room, letters cut out of cardstock and strung on ribbon: CONGRATS DEREK & TALIA. The ampersand was crooked. There were two bottles of André in a plastic tub of ice from the vending room and a sleeve of plastic flutes, the kind whose bases you have to snap onto the stems, and three or four of the younger account reps were snapping them together and lining them up on the counter in rows, the way children set up dominoes.
Derek Lockhart was in the middle of it, of course. He was always in the middle of things. He was thirty-nine years old and the director of sales for our Midwest region, which meant that he had a glass office in the corner and a bonus structure the rest of us heard about secondhand, and he had the kind of looks that are mostly posture: a big, easy, open-shouldered man with good teeth and a fresh haircut, sleeves rolled to the forearm, no tie. He shook hands with both of his hands. He remembered the names of people's children. When he laughed, he put his head back, and you found yourself laughing too without knowing what at, and then feeling slightly cheated afterward. I had watched him from a distance for a year and a half, and I did not hate him. I want to say that early, because some people later decided I must have. I did not. It would have been simpler if I had.
Talia Rinaldi stood beside him in a green wrap dress, holding her left hand a little out from her body as if it were wet. She was thirty-one and worked in client implementation on the fourth floor, the department that takes a new company's employee census, all eight hundred or two thousand names of it, and builds them into our system so that their dental claims go through. She had dark hair she wore pulled back and a small scar through her left eyebrow that she sometimes touched when she was thinking. She was laughing at something one of the reps had said, and turning the ring on her finger with her thumb, around and around, a nervous habit or a new one.
I had my tote bag over my shoulder. In the tote bag, under my lunch container and my reading glasses and the paperback I had not been reading on my breaks for two weeks, was a manila file folder, letter-sized, with a two-hole clip at the top. I had set the bag down beside my chair in accounts payable and not looked at it all morning, the way you don't look at a stove you aren't sure you turned off. I could feel it there now, the stiff edge of it against my hip, through the canvas and through my cardigan.