At reception, Constance Whitaker looked up from her keyboard. At fifty-eight, she wore her silver hair pinned behind her ears and reading glasses on a fine chain, and she had worked for Mercer Meridian since the days when its entire front office consisted of a borrowed desk. She recognized Dante almost immediately, not from the face printed in old business magazines but from the way he instinctively shifted his body to shield Matilda from a passing luggage cart. Her fingers stopped above the keys, and for a moment the practiced welcome she offered strangers vanished.
Dante met her eyes and made a small movement with his head. It was not quite a greeting and not quite a warning, but Constance understood it. He gave the name printed on an application for an entry-level operations analyst position, a fictional identity created for a private assessment of the company's hiring practices. The interview had been placed on the calendar through a legitimate recruiting channel, and the two documents in his folder carried the supporting confirmations. Constance knew him well enough not to ask what he was doing.
"Your interview is scheduled for this morning," she said, careful to keep her voice ordinary. "Please take a seat. Someone will come for you."
"Thank you, Miss Whitaker," he said. Matilda waved, and Constance's composure almost failed because she could see Rosalind in the child's smile. She gave the little girl a visitor sticker and pointed them toward a long upholstered bench opposite a glass-walled conference room. Dante led Matilda there without using the private elevator, asking for executive access, or mentioning his real name to the guards.
Matilda swung her feet and watched elevator doors open onto groups of people carrying laptops and folders. A man hurried past talking loudly about a valuation meeting, while another complained about a delayed driver and demanded that the lobby staff find him a different car. Someone moved a vase of white orchids two inches to the left before a visiting investor arrived. The building seemed to have rules for the placement of flowers but no particular rules about noticing a child.
Ten minutes passed, then twenty. Dante checked the time and wrote a quiet note in the margin of a page inside his folder, recording when he had arrived and how long he had been waiting. He did not photograph anyone or confront the staff, because he wanted to know whether ordinary courtesy would appear when no important title was attached to him. Matilda took the rabbit onto her lap and arranged its repaired ear beneath its chin.
At the far end of the lobby, a young administrative assistant dropped a folder while a senior manager spoke sharply into her ear. The manager did not help gather the papers, although he had to step around them to continue down the corridor. Near the elevators, an older custodian paused his cleaning cart to let three investors pass, then received an impatient gesture to move farther aside. Dante watched the man's shoulders settle in a way that suggested this had happened too many times to count.
After forty minutes, Matilda quietly asked whether interviews were supposed to take so long. Dante told her that sometimes people ran behind schedule, but he no longer believed the explanation himself. Across the glass wall, a meeting continued beneath soft white lights while refreshments appeared at one end of the table. Nobody from the recruiting team had approached to explain the delay, and no one offered water to the girl who had been sitting in plain view of the reception desk.