"And I have to collect your badge."
Agata took it out of her blazer pocket, the real one, with her picture on it from 2016, when her hair had been long and dark and her face had been fuller, and laid it on top of the folder. Gwendolyn picked it up and looked at it for a second longer than she needed to before she dropped it into an envelope.
"Is there anything else," Gwendolyn said, "anything of the company's that you have? Equipment? Keys? Any other credentials?"
Agata did not look at the door. She did not have to.
"No," she said. "Nothing else of the company's."
Behind her, Alvin Varnum did not move, and did not say a word.
It had been a Saturday in March, seven years and seven months ago. Agata could have told anyone the date without looking it up and preferred not to: the ninth of March, 2019, a Saturday, cold, a thin snow falling on Hartford in the evening that had stopped before midnight. She had not been in the building. She had been at home in New Britain on the couch with Zofia, who was eight then, and they had fallen asleep there under one blanket.
She found out on Monday, like most of the building. There was an email from the Chief Administrative Officer at eight-fifteen, three short paragraphs, with the subject line A Loss in Our Stanhope Family. Quentin Varnum, twenty-six, a member of our facilities night staff, had passed away in the building early Sunday morning as the result of a medical emergency. He had worked at Stanhope for four years. He was studying for his HVAC journeyman's license at Capital Community College. Our thoughts are with his father, Alvin, whom many of you know from the lobby, and with his mother, Florine. Grief counselors would be available on the fourth floor. The email did not say where in the building he had died. Everyone knew anyway by noon. People said stairwell, and then they said C, and then they said it was his asthma, and then they said he had been found on the landing at nine, sitting up against the wall, by the morning engineer who came in at six, and that his inhaler had been in his hand, and that it had been empty.
At ten-thirty that Monday her boss had come to her desk. Anselm Voight was Director of Corporate Security then, before he was Vice President of Corporate Real Estate and Security, a lean, soft-spoken man in his fifties with a gray beard trimmed close and reading glasses on a cord around his neck, a former state trooper who still said "ma'am" and "sir" to people in the elevator. He had hired her. He had taught her, in her first year, how to read an access log the way an old trooper reads tire marks. He stood by her desk that Monday with his hands in his pockets and said, very quietly, "I need everything we have on 1147 from Saturday six p.m. to Sunday seven a.m. Every door. Every event. Print it, don't email it. And then bring it to me and nobody else."
She had pulled it. It had taken eleven minutes. She remembered the printer on twenty-two warming up with a sound like someone clearing their throat.