"To Derek!"
And over the rim of his flute, while the room drank, Derek looked across the kitchenette and past the printers and found me behind the copier. I don't know how he knew where I was. Maybe he had known the whole time. His face did not change, but his eyes did — they went wide, and then they asked me something. I believe they were asking me not to. I believe they were also asking me something else, which I have never been able to put a name to, and which may have been the opposite.
I walked out from behind the copier.
It's about thirty feet from the copier alcove to the kitchenette counter. I walked it in my tan flats on the gray carpet, and the strangest thing — the thing I keep coming back to — is that nobody saw me coming. People were drinking, laughing, turning to each other. A woman in beige walked through the middle of a party, and the party parted around her without noticing, the way water parts around a stone. I could have walked all the way to Derek's elbow and back to the third floor and no one would have remembered it. That was the last moment of my life when that was true.
I stopped at the counter. The cake was between us — SHE SAID YES!!!, the frosting diamond, a corner already cut out of it — and Derek was on the other side, and Talia was beside him with her hand on his arm, and she turned and saw me and smiled automatically, the polite, puzzled smile you give a coworker you can't quite place. "Oh, hi —" she said.
I took the folder out of my tote bag. I held it over the counter for a second. Then I opened my fingers and let it drop.
It landed flat beside the cake with a slap that, in the noise of the room, should not have been loud, and was. The clip had come loose in the bag, and the top pages skated out across the butcher block, and one of them slid into the edge of the buttercream and stuck. People turned. Dwayne said, "Whoa."