He was quiet long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer.
"My mother worked here," he said. "Twenty-two years. She set up this room every morning before board meetings. She polished out the water rings with oil she bought herself, because facilities took three weeks." He looked at the long deep shine of the table. "On school holidays she sat me in reception with a book. Where Ms. Osei was sitting yesterday. Same couch, I think. They've reupholstered it."
The floor of Lindsay's stomach dropped away. "What was her name? I've been here twenty-two years, I might have—"
"Eunice Turner. She retired in 2005."
She searched. She stood in the bright corridors of her own memory and looked for a tall Black woman on the partners' floor, and found a shape. A voice. A desk near Halloran's office with a plant on it. Nothing she could pick up and hold.
He watched her search, and she understood that he was watching her fail, and that he had known she would.
"Take the day," he said, rising. At the door he stopped. "Ms. Corrigan. Whatever you decide, I'd prefer you didn't make it about me. I'm not interested in being your reason to be better. I have a firm to run and a son applying to college and a mother who expects me for dinner on Tuesdays." Something moved across his face, a tiredness older than this week. "People in your position are often tempted to find someone who'll tell them how they're doing. I'd look elsewhere."
He went out. She sat alone until the sun came over the buildings and lit the copper on the Woolworth spires, and the room filled with ordinary light.
VII.
She stayed. She handed Douglas his folder back unsigned, and he looked at her as if she had spat on his grandfather's portrait. "He's going to use you," he said. "You'll be his exhibit A." She said she understood that was possible. He spoke to her only once more before he retired in January, in a December hallway, to ask whether she might tell a board member or two that the new chairman was "running a social program instead of a business." She said no. Turner kept the Brandt name on the door anyway.
The cost came in installments.