Bradley glanced at the message without sitting down. "Patricia's office is booking my charity cases now?" he said, loud enough for his assistant to hear the impatience. He had noticed that several visitors referred through Ms. Holt's office were community partners or small vendors seeking contract renewals, and he had developed the habit of treating them as an interruption to his real work. "Tell her to wait. If it's important, she won't leave."
Loretta heard the message through an open door forty feet away when Bradley emerged to speak to a different manager. He was already talking on his phone, half laughing at something a colleague had said, and he looked at her the way he looked at an unattended parcel. "Good morning, Mr. Kincaid," she offered, rising from her chair.
He gestured casually toward the seat as if granting her a privilege. "Sit down. I'll get to you when I get to you."
She sat again. There was no reason to argue, and she had not come to the building to teach a stranger a lesson in front of the reception staff. She wrote down 9:04 beside his words, not because she intended to embarrass him, but because exact words, exact times, and exact names had served her better than anger for thirty years. The small notebook already contained the printed address and the name of the person she had come to meet, copied from a confirmation email that had deliberately said nothing about her position.
A younger woman at the reception desk noticed the untouched chair and the way Loretta kept glancing toward the wall clock. She was in her late twenties, with dark hair pinned neatly at the back of her head and a narrow silver bracelet she turned around her wrist when she was nervous. Her name tag read TERESA ORTIZ, and she carried a glass of water on a tray even though the lobby's formal hospitality service had not yet begun. "Here," Teresa said, bending slightly so the glass would not spill. "Looks like it might be a while."
"Thank you," Loretta said. "What's your name?"
"Teresa, ma'am. Teresa Ortiz."
Loretta repeated it once, the way she repeated names she intended to remember. Teresa smiled and said she hoped the meeting went well, although she had seen enough of Bradley's moods to know that hoping was sometimes all a front-desk employee could do. When she returned to her station, her senior colleague Hayley glanced toward Loretta with a troubled expression. "She's got an appointment," Teresa whispered, as if offering an explanation for the ordinary courtesy she had just shown.
At 9:12, Bradley came back into the lobby holding a second phone in his hand. He was speaking into its camera, addressing a woman whose voice came from the speaker with affectionate impatience. "The light across the street is perfect right now," the woman said. "Ten minutes, babe. I swear. I need the skyline behind you for the video."
"You said you were thirsty," Bradley replied, smiling at the screen. "I'm getting something now."