"I was in the back."
"I remember. I remember there were people from the building in the back. I thanked some of them." His voice did not rise; it went flatter, harder, as if it were being pressed. "Seven years. Every morning. You walked past my desk. You went through number eight so you wouldn't have to look at me. I thought you were stuck up. Florine used to ask me, who's nice in the building, who says good morning, and I'd tell her, and I'd say there's this one lady on twenty-two who acts like I'm a lamp."
"That's fair."
"I don't want fair. I want—" He stopped. He put the reading glasses back into his pocket. His hand, she saw, was not entirely steady. "Why'd you keep it? If you weren't going to say anything. Why didn't you put it in the machine like they told you?"
She had asked herself the question so many times that she had a good answer ready, a clean one, about evidence, about the chain of custody, about knowing someday somebody would need it. She opened her mouth to say it and found it was not there.
"Because I couldn't," she said. "That's all. I stood at the shredder and I couldn't. And then I told myself I'd give it to you. I'd come down to the desk one morning and I'd give it to you and tell you. I was going to do it in April. Then I was going to do it on the anniversary. Then I had Zofia by myself, my ex moved to Arizona, and I needed the job, and Anselm had trusted me, and the doors were fixed. I fixed them. I wrote the test. I ran it every quarter and they opened every quarter and I told myself that was what I owed. That nobody else would be in there. That that was the thing I could do." She heard her own voice and disliked it. "And then in April they didn't open. And I opened the ticket and I went on leave and I lay in a chair for four months with poison going into me thinking about that stairwell. And this morning I was going to come in and fix it. That was the whole plan. Come back and fix it. And my badge didn't work."
Alvin Varnum looked at her for a long moment.
"You're not getting any sympathy from me today," he said.
"I'm not asking for any."
"Good." He looked down at the printout again. "What's the stair group?"