"How old is the kid?"
"It doesn't say."
"Wonderful," said Celeste, and went to find the restroom so she could fix her lipstick before she had to be polite to anyone.
* * *
She noticed the boy before she noticed the father, because the boy was the kind of thing a person noticed.
He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the lounge between two leather armchairs, though there were plenty of armchairs available to sit in, and he was wearing a pair of enormous red over-ear headphones that made his head look smaller than it was. He was nine, perhaps ten. Thin wrists. A buzz cut that had grown out unevenly. He had a blue plastic folder open on the carpet in front of him, the kind with an elastic band and a Velcro flap, and he was taking papers out of it one at a time, looking at each, and putting it back in exactly the order it had come out.
The father sat in one of the armchairs with his elbows on his knees. He was a big man gone soft at the middle, wearing work boots that had been cleaned for the occasion and a gray quarter-zip pullover with a company logo stitched on the chest: HALE HEATING & AIR. He was watching the boy the way some men watch a fire they've built in a high wind.
Celeste took the chair farthest from them and opened her laptop. She had forty-one slides to review. The campaign was called Seen. It had cost eleven million dollars to develop, and it was going to be the thing that made the board choose her over Gerald Pike when Frances Moll retired in January, because Gerald had spent twenty years selling moisturizer and Celeste had spent twenty years selling the idea that a person could become someone else entirely, someone better, with the right thing on her face.
Slide four showed a young woman with freckles and a buzz cut, looking straight into the camera. Her name was Wren. She was autistic, and she was the face of the campaign. Below her photograph, in a typeface the agency had charged four hundred thousand dollars to design, were the words BEAUTY THAT DOESN'T ASK PERMISSION.
Celeste had met Wren once, at the shoot. Wren had worn sunglasses indoors because of the lights, and Celeste had asked her handler, quietly, whether that would be a problem for the schedule.
Across the lounge, the boy made a sound. Not loud. A low, steady note, like a refrigerator compressor, that went on and on.
Celeste looked up. The father had leaned down and put his hand flat on the boy's back, between the shoulder blades, and the boy had leaned into the hand without looking at it, and the note went on, a little softer now.