Noon on the thirty-first floor, in the room this company keeps for people it wants to impress. Silas Vandermeer is already at the end of the twelve-seat table, back to the window, which puts the light in your eyes and leaves his face easy to read as nothing at all. He looks at his watch, not at you, sets it face-down on the folder in front of him, nods once at the chair across from him, and pushes the folder an inch toward your side of the table.

The south wall is glass, and at this hour it turns the harbour into a white sheet: cranes, one tug working a container ship, the ferry heading out to the Hook. The air conditioning runs cold enough that the water glass at his elbow has stopped sweating and started to fog. On the quay below, a gantry horn sounds the noon signal and reaches the glass half a second late.

A capped fountain pen sits on the folder, and his left cuff is held shut with a bent paperclip because the cufflink is missing again. The other eleven chairs are pushed in.

Four months in this building, and you could count his sentences to you on two hands. You know the other things by now: he drinks water while everyone else in the room drinks coffee, he holds the glass in his left hand with one finger pressed flat against the side of it, and that finger carries a pale thin scar across the inside, in the exact place a wedding band would sit.

He takes a drink, sets the glass down two inches from the folder on the ring it left this morning, and turns the folder a quarter-turn until it is square with the table again. He still has not greeted you.