"I can come back after lunch," he told them. "I need a minute outside first." Victoria began to offer him a private office, a chauffeur, anything she could arrange quickly. Daniel shook his head. "A quiet bench will do."
She stepped out of his way, and the crowd opened a path without anybody needing to be told. Daniel sat on a bench beneath the trees near the building's side entrance, where the delivery trucks passed and nobody from the executive floor usually lingered. His hands trembled only after he had been alone for several minutes. He had spent the entire confrontation trying not to let his anger become another thing the company could use against him, and now that the danger had passed, the effort left him exhausted. He took out his phone and looked at Lily's photograph. The promise to attend her school presentation suddenly seemed much more fragile than it had at breakfast.
He almost called Emily's old number, an instinct he sometimes felt when something important happened. Instead, he played the first seconds of one of her recorded stories and listened until her familiar laugh interrupted the reading. Then he put the phone away and breathed deeply. He was glad he still had a job, but he was angry, too, and he was tired of pretending that anger was something a decent person should never feel. There was nothing unreasonable about wanting to be treated fairly after twenty-two years of showing up.
Inside, Victoria asked Helen and Martin to meet her in a conference room. Claire came with the original service request, the access approval, and the maintenance photographs Daniel had submitted. The evidence filled only a few pages. Victoria spread them across the table and asked Martin why nobody had put them together before the incident became public. Martin explained the failure between software systems, but when she asked why he had not checked with facilities before labeling Daniel a suspicious entrant, he had no useful answer.