"I took it to Anselm in June. He said he'd raise it with the vendor at the executive level. In August he said it was in the retrofit plan. Agata." Kiran glanced again at Alvin. "The building's being sold. You knew that, right? They announced it in September. A REIT out of Boston, they're doing a sale-leaseback, Stanhope stays as the anchor tenant but it won't own the tower anymore. Closing's December fifteenth. Everybody up here thinks nobody upstairs wants a fire marshal anywhere near this building until the fifteenth."
"Is that what you think?"
He looked at the floor. "I think I've got a kid starting daycare in January and a contract that says Ardent can reassign me to Phoenix with two weeks' notice. And I think I tested stairwell C again last Thursday after hours on a dry run, panel in test mode, and the doors on twenty-one, seventeen, thirteen, nine, and five didn't release." He looked up. "Those are the re-entry floors. Your re-entry floors. They're supposed to open from the stair side all the time, alarm or no alarm. After the update they don't. They read the card like any other door. Anybody without the stair group who goes into that stairwell above the lobby right now can't get out except at the bottom."
Behind Agata, Alvin Varnum made a sound. It was not a word. It was the sound of a man breathing in through his nose very fast.
Kiran turned toward him, and Agata saw him, for the first time, actually register who the escort was, and she saw it arrive on his face, the name, the lobby, March, the email with the subject line A Loss in Our Stanhope Family. Kiran had started at Stanhope in 2020. He had only ever heard the story the way the building told it, which was in pieces, in the elevator, with the voice lowered.
"Mr. Varnum," Kiran said. "I'm—"
"Can you give us the room, son," Alvin said.
Kiran looked at Agata. She nodded. He picked up his coffee and then put it down again and left it, and went out, and the glass door swung shut behind him on its slow hydraulic closer, and sealed with a soft click.
Alvin stood with his back to the door. Outside the south window, twenty-two floors down and across Trumbull, a man in an orange vest was raking leaves on the Bushnell Park lawn into a long brown windrow, and beyond him the carousel was closed for the season, its painted horses shrouded in tarps. Agata put the blue folder down on top of the box with Zofia's photograph and took her mother's wallet out of the pocket of her blazer and opened the bill compartment and took out a small square of paper that had been folded eight times, so long ago that the folds had become soft as cloth, and gone brown at the creases, and split a little at the corners where they met.
"There's more than the card," she said. "There's this."