"Why didn't you report them?" Daniel asked, then immediately regretted how the question sounded.
Therese looked at him for a long moment. "I did, in the ways I knew how. I told supervisors and sent messages to HR. I asked security to check appointments."
"The complaints were returned to the same offices that made the decisions. After a while, the only place I knew the record would survive was here."
Rory stopped on an entry marked with a small letter P. "What does this mean?"
"That's the flag the guards used," Therese said. "It appeared beside certain visitors' names or photographs on their tablets. Nobody ever explained the code officially. We learned that a P meant slow them down, demand extra verification, and send them away if you could find a reason."
"And who got flagged?" Daniel asked.
Therese traced a finger along the page. "Black men. Latino men. Women wearing head wraps."
She turned to another page. "Asian engineers. People whose surnames sounded unfamiliar to Mr. Ashdown. There were exceptions, but not many."
Daniel imagined his father arriving in this building wearing the dark blue work shirt he had favored through two decades of double shifts. His father would have stood politely at the desk, carried every document required, and apologized even while someone treated him as suspicious. Daniel had built a company large enough to buy Summit, yet his first morning had brought him into the same structure his father had known. The resemblance made his throat tighten.
His father's name was Robert Carter. He worked mornings maintaining public buildings and evenings unloading trucks at a wholesale market, saving enough to help Daniel attend college without borrowing more than necessary. Robert was proud of every honest job he held, but he had spent years being treated as invisible by people whose offices he repaired. Daniel remembered watching a manager step around his father to ask a younger employee whether the equipment had been fixed, as though Robert's uniform made him incapable of speaking for himself.
When Daniel founded Carter Meridian Holdings years later, Robert was still alive to see the first profitable contract. He did not ask about valuation or investor presentations. He wanted to know whether the employees received their pay on time and whether vendors had to chase invoices. Daniel had laughed then, thinking his father's questions too modest for the scale of his ambition. Standing over Therese's notebook, he finally understood how ambitious those questions really were.
"Why keep all of this?" Rory asked.
Therese's voice shook. "Because if nobody writes it down, people start believing it didn't happen. Each person who left probably thought it was just them. I wanted a record that showed it wasn't."
Rory took a careful breath and explained what the notebook might mean. Summit's federal subcontracts included equal-opportunity and nondiscrimination obligations, and records of deliberate exclusion from vendor competitions could have consequences extending far beyond the lobby. It would take a documented investigation to establish which obligations had been breached, and the notebook alone was not a final verdict. But it was strong reason to preserve records, review the screening criteria, and notify the appropriate compliance officers.
"Four thousand people work here," Therese said. "I don't want them to lose their jobs because I kept a notebook."