"Did he say who he was?"
"No," Kyra said. "I figured he worked here." She looked at Lindsay for a moment — a steady, clinical, entirely polite look — and Lindsay understood, the way you understand you've missed a step in the dark, that Kyra Osei had read something in her face just now and filed it away, and would not be asking.
They met for twenty-five minutes in the small room by the elevators. It was the worst meeting Lindsay had run in years. She lost her place in her own notes. She asked a question Kyra had answered in writing in July. At the end Kyra closed her binder and said, kindly, "Ms. Corrigan, are you all right?" and Lindsay said, "Yes, of course, just a very strange morning," and they rescheduled for the following week, and Kyra went down in the elevator with her tote over her shoulder.
When she was gone, Lindsay found Rafael at his desk outside her office.
"You were in the hall this morning," she said. "Around quarter to ten."
He looked up. He was twenty-eight, from Parkchester, careful with his words in the way of someone who had learned early that his words would be weighed differently from other people's. He had been her assistant for two years. She thought of him as excellent and quiet, and she realized now that she had never once asked him what he thought about anything that wasn't on her calendar.
"Yes," he said.
"What did you see?"
He held her eyes for a long second. She watched him decide how much to risk.
"I saw you go in," he said. "I saw him standing there. I saw you say something and close your eyes. Then Mr. Brandt went in, and your face changed." He paused. "By eleven people were saying you'd told the new owner to go wait with Ms. Osei."
"That's not—" she said, and stopped, because the next words in her mouth were what happened, and it was exactly what happened. "I thought she'd said she was bringing someone. Her CFO, or a board member. I thought he was with her."