We rode up four floors in silence. It was perhaps twenty seconds. I watched the numbers above the door. I could feel him not looking at me, the way you can feel heat from a stove. When the doors opened on five, he didn't move, and I didn't move, and then I said, "Excuse me," and stepped around him with my box, and walked down the hall to the records room, and didn't look back.
I never said anything to him. Not then, not for a year and a half after. And he never said anything to me. Sometimes, after that, I would pass him in the lobby or the parking garage or the line at the coffee cart, and he would look at me, quick and then away, and once — once, at the holiday party, when he was telling the pond story at the end of the buffet table, and I was standing near the cheese tray with a paper plate of crudités I didn't want — he saw me there in the middle of a sentence and faltered. Just for a second. He lost his place, and said, "Where was I," and somebody said, "The water was up to her chin!" and he said, "Right. Right," and went on, and didn't look at me again for the rest of the night.
I want to be very fair to him, because it would be easy not to be. I have thought a great deal about what that silence in the elevator meant to him, and I believe that what he understood, standing there, was that I had seen him take it, and that I was going to let him keep it. And I was. I did. I let him. I'm not sure there is much difference, morally speaking, between a man who takes something that isn't his and a woman who stands there in a beige coat and watches him do it and says nothing. My mother would have said that I was safe, and that safe was the whole point. My mother would have said that a woman who keeps her head down never has to find out what happens when she lifts it.
Talia came to work at Brecken the November before last.
I didn't know it was her at first. A new hire in implementation is a name on a direct-deposit form and a W-4, which come through payroll, not through me; I only see the people who order things, or who travel and need reimbursing. But in her second week she submitted an expense report for a training trip to our Indianapolis office, mileage and a hotel and two meals, and attached a receipt from a Speedway that had a smear of something on it, and I walked it up to the fourth floor to ask her about it, because that is the sort of thing I do. She was at her desk with her headphones in, frowning at a spreadsheet of nine hundred and forty names, and she looked up at me and pulled one earbud out and smiled — a quick, real smile, a little embarrassed already, as though she knew she'd done something wrong with the form and was sorry to have caused anyone trouble — and I saw the scar through her left eyebrow, a thin white line that parted the hairs, and the room went very quiet around me.
"Sorry," she said. "Is it the gas receipt? I spilled coffee on it. Is it not legible?"
I don't remember what I said. Something about the total. She found a second copy in her email and forwarded it to me, and thanked me, and asked my name, and I told her, and she said, "Thanks, Etta," and put her earbud back in, and I walked back to the stairwell and stood on the landing between four and three with my hand on the cold steel rail for several minutes before I could go down.
Derek had gotten her the job. I learned that the way you learn everything in an office, by not asking. She'd been a claims analyst for a hospital system downtown before the accident; she'd been driving to an early shift that morning; and after it, after the hospital and the surgery on her shoulder that I hadn't known about and the months of physical therapy, she had not been able to make herself drive on the interstate again. The hospital job was a twenty-five-minute highway commute. Brecken was eleven minutes from her new apartment, by surface streets. Derek walked her résumé to the director of implementation himself. I thought — I am trying to tell you everything I thought, the bad along with the rest — I thought, he wants her where he can watch over her. And then I thought, he wants her where he can watch. And then I was ashamed of myself, because I had no evidence for either thing, and because it would have been just as true to say that he wanted to help a frightened woman he loved get a job she could drive to.