The elevator arrived. She stepped in, pressed twelve, and leaned against the back wall.

Three hundred and twelve dollars. She was going to return all of it. Tomorrow. First thing.

She already knew she wasn't going to return any of it.

The doors opened on twelve, and her manager was waiting.

Not waiting for the elevator. Waiting for her. Mr. Hartwell -- she was supposed to call him Mr. Manager, everyone did, it was a whole thing -- stood in the corridor with his arms crossed over his chest and his face the color of a bruised plum. He was a small man, balding, with a persistent sheen of sweat on his forehead that worsened in direct proportion to his anxiety level. Right now his forehead looked like it had been glazed.

"Holloway." His voice came out as a hiss. "Where have you been?"

"I -- lunch ran a little long --"

"A little long? A little long?" He grabbed her elbow and steered her away from the elevator bank, his fingers digging in with the strength of a man in the grip of genuine terror. "Do you know what day it is?"

"Tuesday?"

"It's the London signing. The London clients are here. They're upstairs right now, in the executive conference room, and Mr. Blackwood -- Mr. Blackwood himself -- is personally overseeing the contract ceremony, and you -- you --" He seemed to run out of breath. His face went from plum to something closer to eggplant. "You were supposed to have the collated briefing folders on the thirty-eighth floor twenty minutes ago."

Grace's stomach dropped. The briefing folders. The ones she'd finished binding that morning, the ones sitting in a neat stack on her desk, the ones she'd planned to deliver right after lunch because she'd had plenty of time, because lunch was a full hour and the thirty-eighth floor was only an elevator ride away.

"I have them," she said quickly. "They're on my desk. I'll take them up right now --"

"There is no right now. Right now was twenty minutes ago." Mr. Manager -- she really couldn't call him that to his face but her brain wouldn't supply his actual name -- pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and mopped his forehead. "I already had Jennifer take them up. She found them on your desk. You're lucky she did or I would be -- we would both be --" He shuddered. "Do you have any idea what happens to people who embarrass this department in front of Alexander Blackwood?"

Grace opened her mouth to answer.

"They disappear, Holloway. They vanish. I had a colleague in '09 -- never mind. The point is, you are already on thin ice. You've been here three weeks. Three weeks, and you've been late twice, you filed the Kerrigan report under the wrong index code, and last Thursday you accidentally cc'd the entire floor on an email about your aunt's bunion surgery."

"That was a private email. I don't know how it --"

"The entire floor, Holloway. Forty-seven people received a photograph of your Aunt Linda's left foot."

Grace closed her eyes briefly. "I know."

"So you can imagine my reluctance to trust you with anything more complex than delivering folders, and you've now proven that even that is beyond your capabilities." He stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket and jerked his chin toward the elevator. "Come with me. Since you clearly can't be trusted to manage your own time, I'm taking you upstairs myself. You'll wait in the executive lounge until the signing is over, and then you'll come back down here and we'll have a longer conversation about your future at this company."

Grace followed him into the elevator in silence. He pressed thirty-eight. They rode up without speaking. Mr. Manager stared at the ascending numbers with the fixed expression of a man watching a guillotine blade rise.

The thirty-eighth floor was different from twelve. Grace had never been up here before. The corridor was wider, the carpet thicker, the lighting warmer. Everything looked expensive and slightly hushed, the way expensive things always did, as if money had a sound-dampening quality.

Mr. Manager led her past a set of frosted glass doors, down a corridor lined with oil paintings that Grace didn't dare look at too closely, and stopped in front of a door marked Executive Lounge.

"In here," he said. "Sit down. Don't touch anything. Don't talk to anyone. Don't -- just don't do anything. Can you manage that?"

"Yes."

"Can you, though?"

"Yes."

He gave her one last look -- the look of a man entrusting his car keys to a teenager -- and walked away down the corridor, dabbing at his forehead.

Grace pushed open the door and stepped into the executive lounge.

It was a large room, quietly opulent. Leather sofas in dark cream, a coffee table with a crystal vase of white flowers, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking downtown Manhattan. A small kitchenette in one corner with an espresso machine that looked like it required a pilot's license to operate.

The room was not empty.

A girl sat on one of the leather sofas, her legs crossed at the ankle, her posture so straight it looked rehearsed. She was small -- seven years old, maybe eight -- with dark hair cut in a precise bob that framed a pale, sharp face. She wore a navy dress with a white Peter Pan collar, white knee socks, and patent leather Mary Janes that didn't quite reach the floor. A book lay open on her lap, a thick hardcover with gold lettering on the spine.

She looked up when Grace entered, and her eyes -- gray, startlingly gray -- swept over Grace from head to toe with the evaluative precision of a jeweler examining a suspect diamond.

"Hello," Grace said. She tried a smile. "I'm Grace. Are you waiting for someone?"

The girl stared at her for three full seconds without blinking.

"Your suit doesn't fit," she said.

Her voice was clear and precise, with the clipped vowels of someone who had learned to speak in a household with very high standards. She sounded like a very small, very unimpressed CEO.

Grace looked down at her suit. It didn't fit. It was too big in the shoulders and too tight across the hips, because she'd bought it off the clearance rack at a store that apparently designed its clothes for women shaped like rectangles.

"It's -- well, it's what I've got," Grace said. She sat down on the sofa across from the girl and set her shopping bag on the floor beside her. "What's your name?"

"You have ink on your collar."

Grace's hand went to her collar. There was, in fact, a small blue ink stain near the left point. She'd noticed it that morning and tried to cover it with her hair. "Yeah. Pen exploded."

"And your glasses are crooked."

Grace pushed her glasses up her nose. "They do that."

"And your hair is coming out of that --" The girl gestured at Grace's bun with one small hand, making a vague circular motion that somehow conveyed deep aesthetic disapproval. "Whatever that is supposed to be."