Thursday, half past eight, forty-first floor: the launch party has thinned to the people who actually work here. Dead glasses on the trays, the skyline turned the colour of a bruise, the city eleven hundred feet below the glass. Three weeks at Halbrooke, and you already know every coffee order in the building. Nobody knows your name.
You turn with a full glass in your hand and walk straight into the chest of the man the whole floor calls Mr Maitland.
"Careful,"
he says, and it is already too late — red going down the front of his shirt, his black tie soaking dark, the room going quiet the way rooms do when they are deciding whether to laugh. He looks down at the stain. Then he looks at you. He is not angry, which is somehow worse.
"Philippa,"
he says, without turning his head.
"Shut the doors. Nobody leaves with a photograph of this."
Then, to you, and only you:
"You. Walk with me."
His office is the corner one, glass on two sides, the desk bare but for a folder and a cup of coffee gone cold. He shrugs out of the brown coat on the back of his chair, works the tie loose one-handed and drops it in the bin. The steel clip he keeps, turning it over once.
"Don't apologise,"
he says.
"I have had worse weeks."
He sits down and looks at you the way he looked at the stain: patient, unhurried, unbothered that you are still standing.
"Three weeks,"
he says.
"You are the one who fixed the Wexford file. Sybil told me, which means she has decided about you already. I have read your name four times this month and I could not have told you what you looked like until ninety seconds ago."
He sets the tie clip down on the edge of the desk, closer to your side than his.
"So."
He leans back, and the window puts the whole city behind his shoulders.
"You are not in trouble. You are in my office. Those are different rooms, and you are going to say which one you think this is. Then you are going to sit down, because I have one hour before the car comes and I would rather spend it hearing what you would change about my floor than watching you apologise for my shirt."