Therese glanced toward the cameras, then toward the offices where supervisors occasionally crossed the lobby. She had spent years looking for someone who might be willing to hear the truth without first calculating whether it would make them uncomfortable. Now the man who could change the system was asking the question directly, and she found herself frightened by the answer. She reached into her drawer and touched the cover of the notebook.
"Not here," she said. "After hours. There's something I need you to see."
They agreed to meet at six in a conference room on the thirty-eighth floor with Rory present. Therese spent the rest of the afternoon doing her job, verifying visitors, answering calls, and guiding people to meetings. Every time someone approached the desk, she found herself studying the small human details she had been trained to overlook: a worn cuff, an anxious expression, a folded appointment letter kept dry inside a jacket. She had never needed a visitor to be important to treat them with respect, but Warren's memo had turned that simple belief into a dangerous position.
At six, the conference room was empty except for Daniel and Rory. Therese entered carrying the black notebook in both hands, its cover softened by years of use. The pages had been repaired twice with transparent tape. Some entries were written in blue ink, some in black, and in the margins were small pencil marks she had added when someone returned or complained a second time.
"Eight years," Therese said as she placed it on the table. "I started when a delivery driver was left outside in freezing rain because Mr. Ashdown said he didn't look right for the lobby. He was carrying a time-sensitive package addressed to the chief executive. He had a delivery authorization, and the guards could have verified it in less than a minute. He waited almost two hours."
She opened the cover to the first page. The entry recorded the date, the delivery company's name, the driver's name, and the explanation given by security. Beneath that, in different ink, she had added that the driver came back later with wet sleeves and apologized for being late even though he had been standing exactly where he had been told to stand. Daniel read the entry twice.
Rory turned the pages slowly. Each contained names, dates, times, and notes written in a style so economical that the repetitions became impossible to ignore. A contractor named Emeka Okoye had been turned away from a bid meeting despite receiving a calendar invitation. A vendor named Teresa Delgado had been told to use the service entrance even though she was meeting a vice president. An engineer named Minh Tran had been stopped on his first day, his badge confiscated until HR apologized hours later.
Another entry concerned a driver named Brooks who had been asked for identification three times while other delivery workers came and went through the same entrance. An executive assistant from out of state had been ordered to wait outside because the guards said her appearance did not match a visitor photograph. A graduate student attending a recruiting event had left without interviewing after someone at reception asked whether she was looking for a cleaning vacancy. There were enough variations to make the pattern unmistakable and enough ordinary human details to make the harm difficult to dismiss.
"How many entries?" Rory asked.
"Two hundred and twelve," Therese replied. "Some are brief. Some have follow-up notes. I couldn't record every incident, and I don't want anyone to think I did."