What happened afterward came to me in pieces, over the following week, the way office news always does — some of it true and some of it not, and I've given up trying to sort which is which. Talia left the building at three-forty with Bethany, by the stairs. She took the papers with her; Bethany had gathered them up off the floor. Derek stayed in the kitchenette for some time after the room emptied, alone with the cake, and then went into his glass office and closed the blinds. Someone had been filming before it started, of course, for the engagement toast, and there was footage, and it went around the building on people's phones by Monday morning, but it ended, the version I heard about, at the moment I walked out from behind the copier, because whoever was holding the phone hadn't noticed me either, and had turned to film the cake.
On Monday, Deshawn Hartsock from HR asked me to come to the small conference room on two. Two people, he said, had raised a concern about the manner in which I'd addressed a personal matter in the workplace, at a company event. I told him the whole thing, start to finish, the pond and the sergeant and the stairwell and the index card, and somewhere around the part about my mother's hammer he set his pen down and stopped taking notes, and at the end he was quiet a while and then said, "Ms. Coyle, I'm going to write that you were returning documents to their owner." He looked at me. "That's what the report is, right? Her property, more or less. You were returning it."
On Tuesday morning the plaque was gone from the lobby display case. Building services had taken it down at Derek's own request, someone said. There was a clean rectangle on the blue felt where it had hung, a little darker than the faded fabric around it, and the United Way award and the founder and the congressman had all been left exactly where they were, on either side of an empty space.
Derek took the rest of the week off. He came to the stairwell once before he went, on Tuesday afternoon, and stood on the landing until I came out. He looked as though he hadn't slept. He hadn't shaved.
"You could have done it privately," he said. Not angry. Just tired. "You could have found her alone."
"I gave you five weeks to do it privately," I said. "And you told it in front of everybody. Every time. For almost two years, in front of everybody."
He stood with that. Then he nodded. "Yeah," he said. "That's fair." He looked down the stairwell, at the long gray drop of it. "She's at her sister's in Grove City. She won't talk to me. She hasn't given back the ring. She hasn't — I don't know what that means. Maybe it doesn't mean anything." He was quiet. "My dad called. He saw it. Somebody sent it to him, one of the guys from his old firehouse. He didn't say much. He said, you should have told the truth, son. That's all. And then he said — he said, you held her, though. You kept her warm. You stayed till the bus came. He said, a lot of people don't even stop." Derek laughed, and wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. "First real conversation we've had in six years. Isn't that something? I had to get caught."