Agata sat back. Her body did something it had learned to do over the summer, a kind of weighing, as though there were a scale somewhere under her ribs that had to settle before she could speak. Six months of COBRA. She had done the math on the insurance in the middle of the night more than once since July, when the word restructuring had started showing up in the company newsletter that her deputy still forwarded her out of kindness. Her oncologist wanted scans every three months for the first two years. Her daughter, Zofia, was fifteen and played left back on the varsity soccer team at New Britain High, and had a retainer, and needed new cleats roughly every time the moon changed, and had asked her in September in the car, staring straight ahead at a red light, whether they were going to be poor now, in the same flat voice she used to ask whether the lasagna had mushrooms in it.
"Can I ask you about a ticket?" Agata said.
Gwendolyn blinked. "A ticket?"
"A ServiceNow ticket. SEC-4471. I opened it on May second, two weeks before my surgery. It's a priority-one life-safety ticket. I need to know its status."
"I—I wouldn't have access to that. That's IT. Or facilities. I can ask someone."
"It's about the stairwell doors," Agata said, and she was speaking to Gwendolyn but she was aware, as if he were standing much closer than he was, of the man by the frosted glass. "In this building. In April, Ardent pushed a firmware update to the controllers that talk to the fire alarm panel. After the update I ran a test on the stair doors in stairwell C. When the fire alarm goes into alarm, every stair door in a high-rise is supposed to unlock from the stair side, so if you're in the stairwell you can get back onto a floor. It's code. It's the reason you're allowed to lock stair doors at all. After the update, they didn't unlock. Not on the test. I opened the ticket and I put it at priority one and I escalated it to Anselm Voight, and then I went on leave."
Gwendolyn had stopped turning pages. "I didn't know any of that."
"I know you didn't."
"I'll ask," Gwendolyn said. "I'll ask Anselm. I'll find out. Agata, I'm so—I'm going to give you this and you can take your time." She slid the folder across the table. "We've had your office packed. I'm sorry about that too. It was—we didn't know when you'd be in, and the new team needed the space, and it seemed like it would be kinder than having you do it. But if you want to go up and make sure we got everything, Mr. Varnum can take you. That's allowed. Isn't it?" She looked to the door.
"It's allowed," Alvin said.