"It's starting to," said Margot. "Go. Read your book."
* * *
Dottie did not come to her. Margot went to Dottie, on Thursday evening, after the floor had emptied and the reception desk was lit only by the green glow of the phone console and the little lamp Dottie had brought from home in 1998 and refused to replace.
"I know you have it," said Margot.
"I have a great many things, dear." Dottie did not look up from her crossword. "I have a drawer of other people's reading glasses going back to the last century."
"The second print."
"Ah." Dottie wrote a word in pen. She always did the crossword in pen. "Yes. I have that."
"Is it blank?"
"No."
Margot let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding. "Can I see it?"
Dottie put down her pen. She took off her own reading glasses and let them hang on their beaded chain against the knitted reindeer, and she looked at Margot properly, in the way of very old receptionists who have watched a building's worth of people be young and foolish and then become old and foolish in their turn.
"Do you know why I took it?" she said.
"Because people would have put it on the wall."
"Because people would have put it on the wall," Dottie agreed, "and then on their phones, and then it would have been yours for about ten minutes and everybody else's forever." She turned the crossword over. "I was here in ninety-nine, when Mr. Farrow and his first wife came apart. She was a copy chief. They'd married at the old Lisle Brothers Christmas party, if you can believe it; there was a judge in the building that day for a commercial shoot. And when it went bad, it went bad in front of everybody. Notes left on desks. People picking sides at lunch. A young woman named Hattie, she was the receptionist before me, carried messages between their offices for six weeks because neither of them would speak, and when it was over they let her go, because she knew too much, and that was the kindest reason anybody gave. Two clients left. Mr. Farrow played the piano in the dark after hours; I'd hear it when I came in to open up." She was quiet for a moment. "Everybody in that building had a picture of something. Nobody had the whole thing."
Margot said nothing.
"I'm not telling you that so you'll feel sorry for him," said Dottie. "He's a grown man and he's made his own bed, and some of the people he's made it for didn't deserve to lie in it. I'm telling you so you'll understand the picture's not mine to give you just because you ask. It's yours. Yours and that young man's. I'll give it to you when you know what you'd do with it. Not before."
"How will you know when I know?"