He sat on the edge of her bed for a long time before responding. Rosalind had always wanted their daughter to know why the company existed, not merely what it was worth. Dante had postponed that conversation because he had mistaken silence for protection and grief for a reason to wait indefinitely. He told Matilda she could come if she stayed close to him, listened carefully, and understood that some adults might behave badly without it being her responsibility to make them better.
The flight was early enough that the airport was still filled with people speaking in tired voices. Matilda slept against his arm for part of the journey, her rabbit tucked between them. Dante reviewed the evidence only while she was asleep, then closed the folder when she woke and asked for a story. He told her about a girl who carried a small lamp through a storm so that people could find their way home, and he did not mention that he had borrowed the idea from Rosalind's favorite way of explaining their work.
In San Francisco, a driver offered to bring them directly to a private executive entrance, but Dante declined. He wanted to enter through the same doors as the staff who worked in the building each day. He warned the independent attorneys that he would not approve any transaction by telephone while he was inside, and asked them to be ready to invoke a preservation notice if necessary. Then he took Matilda's hand and walked toward the sixty-four-story tower rising through the morning fog.
By the time he had sat for an hour on the bench beneath the glass conference room, he had learned more than he expected. The custodian he had watched being pushed aside earlier came back with a nearly full cart, and Dante helped lift a box so the man could pass without knocking into a display. The custodian thanked him and glanced toward the executive room with a weary expression. "They've got important people today," he said. "Everyone's important until somebody else more important walks in."
Dante asked whether it was always like this. The man considered the question, then said he had worked in buildings where executives knew the cleaners' names and buildings where executives remembered only the cleaning schedule. "This one used to be the first kind," he replied. The statement followed Dante long after the man went through the service corridor, because its quiet disappointment sounded like the beginning of a resignation letter.
A young engineer with a laboratory badge approached the executive elevators and was turned away by a guard. He said he had been called to provide technical information for a budget meeting, but the guard replied that only invited senior personnel could use those elevators during the investors' visit. The engineer looked at his badge, then at the security desk, and finally turned away rather than make a scene. Dante recognized the name of the engineer's division from a canceled project in Archie's files.
"Why couldn't he go up?" Matilda asked after the engineer disappeared. "Maybe he had something important to say."
Dante looked toward the closed elevator doors. "He probably did," he said. "Sometimes the people who know how something works aren't the people who get invited to explain it."