"Well. She asked about you."
"What did she ask?"
"Whether you were still here." The doors opened on forty-one. He held them for her.
At home she found she had started noticing things, and hated it. Which seat she took on the train. Whose résumé she read twice. Who she assumed was the manager at the deli. "It doesn't feel like getting better," she told Pete one night. "It feels like a rock in my shoe."
"That's what the beginning feels like," he said. "Nobody gets a medal for it. You just walk different."
VIII.
The Halo Home Care Cooperative closed its raise on a Thursday in April: seven point two million dollars for a building on Westchester Avenue with training rooms, a childcare center for members' kids, and a dispatch office that would not, Kyra said, be in somebody's basement anymore. Brandt Whitlock was the advisor. The signing was set for ten in the boardroom.
Lindsay came in at seven, out of habit. She was not on the deal team. She had asked Anjali only whether she might sit in, and Anjali had asked Kyra, and Kyra had said, "If she wants," in a tone that gave nothing away.
The boardroom lights were off. An old woman was standing at the north window.
She was tall, in a plum-colored suit and low heels, her gray hair pressed and set, a handbag held in front of her in both hands. She was looking at the Woolworth Building. When Lindsay stopped in the doorway, she turned, unhurried, and Lindsay knew her before she could have said how — not the face, which she had never really looked at, but the posture. The straightness of it.