Six a.m. Agata did the arithmetic without wanting to. Someone had scheduled it. You could set a badge to expire at any minute of any day, months in advance, and people in HR liked six in the morning because it was before anyone arrived and after the overnight backups ran, and because, she had once been told in a meeting by a woman who was trying to be helpful, it meant nobody had to be the one to do it in person.
"I'll call her," Alvin said, to Danita, not to Agata. And then, to Agata, in exactly the same voice: "I need to see a photo ID, ma'am. It's procedure for an escort."
"You know who I am."
"I need to see a photo ID."
She had a slim black wallet her mother had given her the Christmas before she died, cracked leather, a single clear window on one side for a license. She opened it with fingers that had not entirely come back from the chemo, the tips still slightly numb, as if she were wearing a thin pair of gloves under her skin, and she held it out toward him with the license facing up.
What she had forgotten, because she had carried it so long that it had become part of the wallet, part of the weight of the leather in her hand, was what was behind the license in that clear window.
It was a white plastic proximity card, the old kind, thicker than a credit card, with a slot punched in one end for a lanyard clip. The front had gone the yellow of old piano keys. It had no photo. The building had not put photos on facilities night-staff badges in 2019, only a number, stamped in black in the corner, and someone had gone over the number in silver marker so it would show up in the dark, 1147, and next to it, stuck on slightly crooked, was a sticker no bigger than a quarter, half its color rubbed off by years against a license: the green and blue whale's tail and the H of the Hartford Whalers, a hockey team that had not existed in the city since 1997.
She saw him see it.
It was not a large thing. Afterward she would try to describe it to her daughter and fail. He did not step back. He did not gasp or lift his hand. It was only that the stillness of his face, which had always been the stillness of a man who had decided not to react, became a different stillness, the stillness of a man who has been hit and has not yet fallen down. His eyes stopped on the sticker. They stayed there. In the lobby behind him the escalator went on carrying people down into the morning, and Alvin Varnum stood looking at a quarter-sized piece of plastic in a cracked leather wallet as if there were nothing else in the building at all.
"Where," he said. His voice did not change, quite. It went lower. "Where did you get that card?"