Turn 9 of 11

Go back inside and ask Marguerite who the last person was

You turn back. The badge beeps. The lock chunking open the second time sounds different — heavier, or maybe you are just listening differently now, the way you listen to a sentence when you already know it is going to matter. The atrium is empty. The cycling logo drifts across Parvesh's monitor in its slow, patient loop, and your footsteps ring on the tile floor, louder than they were five minutes ago because you are walking with purpose and the building knows it.

Marguerite's door is still closed, the light still leaking from underneath it. You knock, and this time the scrape of her chair is quicker, and when she says "Come in" there is something in it — not surprise, but a recognition, the tone of someone who has been sitting with an empty mug and a returned keyboard and has been expecting this knock.

She is standing behind her desk, not sitting. The keyboard is where you left it, but she has moved it — slightly, just an inch toward the edge, the way you move something you are about to put away. Her coat is on the back of her chair. She was getting ready to leave. She looks at you, and her face does the careful thing again, the smoothing, but slower this time, as if the guard is tired.

"I need to know who the last person was," you say.

"Dara —"

"You told me what it cost them. You didn't tell me who they were."

Marguerite is quiet. The hoover has stopped somewhere on the floor above, and the silence it leaves behind is thick, the kind that fills a room like water. She picks up the pen from the desk — the same pen, black, ordinary, the kind that comes in boxes of fifty — and holds it the way she held it before, turning it between her fingers. She looks at the keyboard.

"His name was Geoff Abery," she says. "He worked in logistics. Eleven years. Quiet man. Methodical. The sort who reads the manual." She pauses, and the pause is a door opening onto a room she does not want to enter but is entering anyway.

"He sat at the desk your Ellis sits at now."

The pen stops turning. Marguerite sets it down with a precision that costs her something — you can see it in her shoulders, the way they hold themselves a beat too still.

"He pressed it for his wife. She had — there was a thing about her. Something he had loved and hated and carried for years, and he decided it was the wall, and he took it out." Marguerite's voice is level, but it is the levelness of something pressed flat by weight.

"She is still alive. She is well. She is not the woman he married. She is someone else's problem now, someone else's joy. She does not know him. He is a stranger to her, and she is a stranger to him, and the thing he removed was the thing that made her reach for him. Without it she is — fine. She is a perfectly fine person who has no idea why a man she has never met wept in a Tesco car park on a Thursday night."

You are standing very still. The name — Geoff Abery — sits in the room the way the keyboard sits on the desk, warm and ordinary and impossible. You know that desk. You know the angle Ellis pushes his chair back, the way he types with two fingers, the coffee cup he leaves half-finished. You know the desk and you did not know the desk had a history, and the history is the same shape as your history, and Marguerite is watching you understand this.

"Why did you give it to me?" you say again, and your voice is quieter now.

"Because you sit across the aisle from that desk," Marguerite says. "And because you looked at the key the way he looked at it. And because I am tired of watching people sit at that desk and not know what the woman across from them is deciding."