I.
Lindsay Corrigan liked to be first into any room that mattered. She had built the habit in her first year at Brandt Whitlock, when she was twenty-seven and the only person on the client floor who had gone to a state school. She had learned that whoever arrived first decided where the water went, which chair faced the door, and which way the blinds were turned. By the time anyone else came in, the room already belonged to someone. Twenty-two years later she was Managing Director of Client Relations and she still did it. She believed it was the reason she had survived three recessions, two reorganizations, and a decade of Douglas Brandt calling every woman on the forty-first floor "kiddo."
So at 9:41 on a Tuesday morning in October, with a leadership meeting called for ten and no agenda attached — Douglas had written only All MDs. Boardroom. Important. Please be prompt. — she came down the glass hallway with her tablet under her arm and her mind on three things at once.
The first was the missing agenda, which almost certainly meant layoffs, or a sale, or Douglas finally retiring. She had run each scenario in the shower and on the train and decided she would survive all of them.
The second was Pete, who had texted at 6:50, Good luck today. Call me after. Love you, followed nine minutes later by Also the roof guy is coming Thursday not Wednesday. That was Pete in a nutshell: a sincere thing and a practical thing, back to back, as if they weighed the same.
The third was Kyra Osei, who had been sitting in reception since a little after nine for a ten o'clock that Lindsay now had no intention of keeping on time.
She had told Rafael to let Ms. Osei know they were running behind. She had not said how far behind. It was the fourth meeting with Osei in four months, about a cooperative of home health aides in the Bronx that wanted to raise money for a building, and somewhere around the second meeting Lindsay had decided it was a lovely idea that would never pencil out. She was waiting for the right moment to say so kindly.
The boardroom was the corner room at the end of the hall, glass on two sides facing the corridor and window on the other two facing the city. On clear days like this one, the Woolworth Building filled the north window like a cathedral someone had stretched upward by hand, all cream terra-cotta and green copper and those absurd, lovely spires. Clients loved it. Lindsay had sold more than one engagement by letting a prospect stand at the glass for a long moment before she said a word.
She pushed the door open and stopped.
A man was standing at the head of the table.