The care she took with those ordinary details unsettled Nathan more than Bradley's open hostility had. He had spent years reading quarterly reports about customer satisfaction and training compliance, but none of those numbers showed a young employee deciding that a stranger deserved enough information to make a choice. Grace never rushed him. She spoke as though he was entitled to understand the terms of his own money, which should not have been remarkable and somehow was.
"Grace," Bradley called from his office doorway. "My office. Now."
"I'm with a customer," she said. Her hand rested on the mouse, waiting. Bradley's mouth tightened just enough for Nathan to see it. "Now," he repeated.
Grace stood, and the easy steadiness in her shoulders disappeared. "I'll be right back, Nathan," she said. "Please don't sign anything until we finish going through the options."
Nathan watched her cross the lobby. Bradley closed his office door behind her, but a panel of glass faced the teller area, and Nathan could see him gesturing at the paperwork Grace carried. He could not hear the words through the partition. He could see the moment her expression changed from attentive to wary, then from wary to something firmer.
Grace Holloway had been working at Branch Twelve for nearly three years, and she had learned to recognize the difference between a manager having a bad morning and a manager choosing his next victim. Her first month had been full of smiles, new uniforms, and talk about helping working families become financially secure. By her third month, she had been handed a sheet of daily sales goals and told that the branch's reputation depended on employees who could turn every opening into an opportunity. By the end of that year, the word opportunity had acquired a meaning that kept her awake at night.
She had been raised in a small brick duplex by a mother who worked nursing-home shifts and a grandfather who repaired appliances in the evenings. Money was never an abstract subject in their house. It was the grocery list, the rent envelope, the amount of gas left in the car, and the unspoken calculation behind whether anyone could afford a new pair of shoes. Grace understood what two hundred dollars meant long before she ever wore a bank name badge.
Her mother, Lorraine Holloway, had developed a chronic back injury that forced her to cut down on nursing shifts. Grace was helping with rent, prescription co-pays, and the occasional surprise expense that arrived whenever they thought they might finally get ahead. Her younger brother, Caleb, was finishing an electrical apprenticeship and contributing what he could, but there was still no room for a missed paycheck. Bradley knew that; he had heard Grace request a schedule change for her mother's medical appointment only two weeks earlier.
Inside the office, he pointed at Nathan's unfinished application. "Customers like him cost this branch more than they bring in," he said. "They withdraw everything before the end of the week, complain when their balance goes negative, and act surprised when services have a price."
"His check cleared verification," Grace replied. "He has an account application. I haven't seen anything that makes him an exception to the normal process."
"Irrelevant. Package the account."
Bradley tapped a printed sales sheet. "Overdraft coverage. The identity monitoring product. The premium account alert package. I want all three."